One Day
One day, not so long ago,
I sat on an airplane
Waiting for it to taxi
To the runway
To take me away
For ten days.
I thought to myself–
No, I wished to myself–
Or maybe I secretly, selfishly
Prayed to God
That the plane would
Take me away
Forever.
That the crash would be quick
And do its job
By consuming us all
In a fiery grave.
My eyes filled:
A daily shower
To keep them clean.
A baptism
To purify them
Of this fantasy,
This sin.
And as they cleared,
As the holy water seeped into
The peanut napkin
Where the red and blue
Of the Delta name
Darkened,
My head cleared too.
For a moment.
Ten days would suffice.
On a Friday Night
I sit as his guest
On his couch
And listen as his grown children
Play.
These would-be vegans
Full of falafel and love and Daiquiri
Ice,
Playing a Mozart piece
And a spiderman video game
And a CD of a band who would
never dream of selling out.
I listen
Beside their father who
I have fallen in love with yet again.
He softly snores,
Then opens his eyes and says with a smile,
“This is my favorite part,”
As he points to the piano
Where his son plays with quiet confidence.
The spirit of this old house
Plays in my heart.
I drink it in
Yet take nothing as I leave
To sleep in my empty house
Where the empty beds of my own children remain unmade
As they sleep,
Full of probable pizza and root beer,
At their father’s.
Our lives divided.
I listen.
And I hear in my mind
My oldest child’s response
When asked by her teacher
The color of her parent’s car
“Blue,” she says.
She doesn’t say silver.
At 2
At 2:28 a.m.
On October 20, 2005
I ask my brain to turn off
To get some sleep
(my body needs some)
But instead it fills itself
With a poem
Or maybe an image
To which this overly active wide awake brain
Assigns words
Beautiful words
That need to be captured
An epiphany
In a couplet
That will change the world
(my world)
Once I write it down
But somewhere between my bed and the computer
(which is off)
It fades away
I try to hold on
To keep it in my brain
But all that remains now is
My pulse
Playing between my ears
Teasing me
Like the final spasm
After great sex
My poetry is out there
Floating around with other lost brain waves
For another to discover
For another to epiphanize
For another who keeps a pad of paper
And a pen beside her bed
Just in case her brain fills with a poem
Silent Night
Snow falls slowly
As the streetlight-orange glow
Finds a space
Between the conventional curtains–
To edge through
And share its dim tinted light
With me
And my new love–
Whom I have loved for months
Without seeing.
I see her now;
Her perfect profile at my breast
For the first time.
And in spite of my
Exhaustion,
Or perhaps because of it,
I am more awake than ever–
Keenly cognizant
Of my enhanced heart.
Some things in life
Are beyond description.
Even the best of poets
Are unqualified
To humanize some feelings
By giving them words.
This is my silent night.
These are my kept
Deep-down emotions–
Cherished for a few mid-night hours
After the agony,
The ecstasy
Of the emerging,
When our cord-connected bodies
Divided.
She is
No longer me,
But forever mine.
