Category: Poetry

I’m not upset that you checked out

I want to as well

But you didn’t take me with you

And missing you is hell.

I’ll come to love another

Because loving is my life

But you are the only man

To whom I would have been wife.

When I hear the mermaids singing

Each to each

To write like Eliot I burn

When I hear screams of Zion

And shells upon the beach

Then to write like Weiss I yearn.

Still

What I love to hear the very most

Is the beat of quiet that sounds

When my words become the lettered ghosts

Of everything I am: realized and unbound.

I will feel unsure and question my decision

But love you without end and without condition

I do not love you because you are flawless

I do not want for you to change

I love you because you are you

And I see that you find that strange

I do not persist because you are perfect

I do no persist because you are not

I persist because you are both

As we have loved and as we have fought

I don’t pretend to know what will be

If you and I will always be “we”

You are the song I sing, even off key

The very dark and light of you

Is the truth that I see.

Do you know that you’re my undercurrent

The humming charge by which I thrive

Though you flickered out long ago,

I love you like when you were alive.

I think the best loves steal up

When one is preoccupied and unaware

To not be searching, yet be missing,

The other who is not there.

The town works department had damaged our sidewalk,

I don’t recall what it was that they had been doing.

But the sidewalk was crashed and smashed

Into shapeless shards; in short, it was ruined.

My mother, Terry was her name,

Called the town to have them repair it

A man from the town came

He blanched and began to swear that

He couldn’t do the job that day,

He’d have to return another time,

And that the damage wasn’t that bad, anyway,

For now, the sidewalk was fine.

My mother set her jaw

And the two of them went back and forth.

She pointed to the damage she saw,

And spoke louder and with more force.

Eventually, the man gave up or gave in,

He would do the job, starting anew,

He recognized that he would not win

As he started to turn, he committed his final sin:

He snidely said: “Are you happy, lady?

You’re getting what you want!”

My mother, correctly pinning him as lazy,

Boiled over, like lava from a font.

She held his gaze but was silent all the same.

Then, with pointed finger, she said with steely reserve,

“No. I gave you my name.

And I’m not getting what I want. I’m getting what I deserve.”

Then she spun like a top

And slammed the door in the man’s face.

It was her coup de grace

The sound that door made.

My mother died too young,

She was only thirty four,

But she’s my hero

For deciding to slam that door.