Old age is a smarmy being
that pushes you from behind,
confusing you with multiple choices
and dithering doubts.
Cutting some strings,
and tightening others,
it challenges your daring of pain,
and wants your attention during sleep.
Ah, this life and its just desserts.
***
Art by Remedios Varo
~Somewhere by a brook~
I say.
A Freudian slip.
You say What? What was that?
I say ~Nothing~
but can’t keep a leash on plodding thoughts
that say
~Plant a small bush~
~One that’s out-of-place~
~One that will thrive on leavings~
***
Image: Flickr.com
Once,
within my hearing,
and thinking himself alone,
he said
I wish I were dead.
And I didn’t man up to that.
I god damn kept my hands in my pockets
and shied away from his tortured road.
And now, in my time of life,
I see to it that things are kept clean,
most especially those hard-to-reach places.
Angels are white-winged, I think,
and brook no negligence of care.
And I don’t know where he is now,
or if he can see my compulsion to shine things.
To bring them to bright.
Or if he knows his boy is just like him.
~I remember me. How I looked to books as if they were to be my next meal. How I bought brushes, special pencils and a book of right paper, still blank. How I sang, at first haltingly, then to praise. In magnets, like poles repel. Their force remains, but dissipates in mulish waste.~
At water’s edge
I plied the sand
for vacant shells
and stones to skip,
so flat.
There,
there was a tree
that had given up,
acute in its angle,
embarrassed at the nakedness of its bleached roots.
Close by,
an eyeless carcass grinned,
in the throes of its last hysterics.
A diving moth
caught in venetian rays,
like a bedside meteor.
In soreness of spirit,
I chew on thoughts of old romancers,
closet dancers.
A recent change of heart.
A looming change of mind.
An anxious left-handed day.
What is here,
by design,
is umbilical to me.
This feed of life
and blood of red.
But now,
instead,
a sorry head
thinks of strife
and the future of a knife.
* Mental health triggers, suicidal ideation*
God. You know, I’m just washing dishes, feeling useful and kind of self-satisfied. Haven’t dropped anything or cut myself, even though the bothersome cat is weaving around my legs. I swear- if he had a ball of yarn, I would have been a coccoon by now.
See, it’s the third week of withdrawal from a particularly nasty medication, and I’m thinking I have aced it. Not too bad, not too bad. There’s a cast iron frying pan with some baked-on crusty stuff, and so I run the water very hot and start leaning into it with the old scrub brush. I’m even thinking that this is good exercise, when the destined vapours rise up to me… the singular smell of fried mushrooms. [Me, at twelve, tagging along with Dad, picking them in fields and ditches, once getting chased by bulls] [Mom, frying them up in her iron pan, the whole house smelling delightful]
And, God dammit, I cry. I rattle dishes and run the water faster to help stifle it. And I think of missed things and squandered chances for love. And I let this self-pity pool into something worse, and I think what is the freaking point of trying to get clean and well? It’s not as if there are more memories to make, more chances to unsquander my wasted life.
And at last, to myself: “You’ve made a mistake, bud. Better go back to the upswing with those meds.” Because I see myself hanging from a tree like those men they found, and I take it to the logical conclusion of worrying about last testaments and burial arrangements. That’s what it does. That is what it does.
And so, tomorrow, we find out what we are made of.
I would make you smile
but I can’t
You want me to smile
but I can’t
Moods change in increments
One step forward
two back
There’s another can’t-
It’s the one about getting rid of crutches,
just now.
Aremyfeetofftheground 