Spaces.

I stare at the space in my mind you occupy
And sometimes you are so very present
and sometimes it's like
You're out to lunch
Maybe
Sign posted on the door
Flipped to the one that reads: will return at _____
But there isn't a time listed
I don't know how to go over it with you
Because my expectations always leave me hanging too.

12 Steps, Part One.

There are various states of broken
And the hardest one is the time when you put all the pieces on the table and you hold the glue in one hand and your dignity in the other and you start to try and put all those pieces back together.

You can't know if all the parts are even there,
You just start in good faith and hope you swept the floor cleanly
Because that's where you were last:
the floor,
And now not only are there shattered shards but must and dust and dog hair,
Caked on crinkly like uncut rose petals from the ones you keep looking at and can't throw away even though they've been dead three days...
[But are they dead now or were they dead when the florist cut them?]

Healing feels like scooping dogshit sometimes
The smell is unpleasant and worse because it came out of something you're supposed to love and squishes inside the plastic: warm in your cold winter hands so nice but disturbing as fuck because let's be real we're talking about defecation, but you're supposed to see yourself as beautiful, it's the wabi sabi way and you learned wisdom from Japan.

There is nothing like sitting at the coffee shop with your 12 step book to advertise your performance artist back alley destructive masochism; as though someone seeing you there will give you virtue instead of the realization that every foot you place in front of itself again from now til eternity might feel like paying penance.

But goddammit. Someday the promise exists that you will actually believe that somebody loves you. And you are willing to scoop up shit with your bare hands and crawl across shattered vases and stare into the face of void-filled black holes created by your enemies for eternity to know the potential of what that means.

And you want to love somebody too.

There is somebody out there. And you want to love them with a part of you buried deep under all that waste paper dumpster fire terror.

You'll unearth it til your nails bleed.
You'll unearth it.

Three Generation Picture

I remember taking my first one at my grandmother's house
And my mother stood behind me smiling and my grandmother behind her: smiling
And the small Christmas tree in the background
That was the same year I carved my name on the underside of the coffee table in their living room
Where I used to sleep on the couch and be afraid of the cuckoo clock in the darkness
I carved my name because I was there
And I was there
And I was there

Years later my mother found the carving and wanted to scold me but the handwriting was so different she knew I'd done it so long before; what could she say?

But I remembered the feeling so fiercely and checked it every year when I slept on the couch to make sure it was still there: I was still there...

My daughter mostly spends time in her room writing or animating or watching videos and I feel the guilt of a guilty parent who understands her loneliness and simultaneously understands there is no way for me to solve it: growing up too fast with her monster vocabulary but her childish mind and maturing figure - why? Why can't things just happen the way they were meant to? The way they so often happen in your mind...

My mother drove away this morning and I'm left with smells of her in the guest bathroom: mixture of Light Days even though she is well into menopause (I guess I'll understand it ten years from now) and strawberry scented hair spray always the chemicals, the alcoholic subtext that she is from a generation that did not care that they destroyed the environment because none of that seemed real to them and last night she asked me "Why do you think your children both have anxiety? Why do so many kids today have anxiety? Is it the school shootings?"

And I don't know what to say to her, remembering my daughter crouching in her assigned hiding space before we decided we had to homeschool and saying "My hiding spot is not good enough; I know they will find me."

I don't want to take her Lovey away from her. Or the way she still sucks her thumb. Grey-pink rabbit clutched in her hands with still-baby-like knuckles even though I'm stashing pads for Tweens under the sink in her bathroom

I'm in the middle mourning both of them and they're very much alive.

My mother who will never know herself and my daughter who knows it all too well and me who can't repair either one of them.

Eulogy

The thing I'd like you to remember most about me
is that I said thank you when you bought those beautiful tomatoes.

Disappointment Part 2.

There is a cheap smattering of snow on the ground this morning
The kind that looks pretty but makes mud
And I want to feel its magic but
Mostly I feel disappointment

The other day you hid in your laundry closet naked
And when I came in the door you poked your head around the corned and said
I don't like that look...
What look? I said
You said - you always look disappointed.

I hear it from my daughter too: mom you look so disappointed in me

And it's funny because I am the opposite of disappointed in everyone

I see their smoldering potential oozing from every pore of their bodies

It's me. See.

It's me that seems disappointing.

That face isn't for you, Love. That face was never for you.

Hard.

You need salve for all your wounds but the only ones offering are the ones who made them
Like a dog licking a bloody sore but putting all that bacteria back in
Why is that our instinct?
How do we heal when there is no one else offering arms of healing
There is just no way to face it by yourself
You sit in a bathtub and tears run criss cross on your cheekbones
Hoping the water will hug you in a way those broken arms can't
And you rock back and forth but that self soothing can't mend the several broken hearts your chest now seems to contain simultaneously
Repetitions of You are hard you are hard you are hard
You are too. Hard.

You feel everything but hard.
You feel endlessly breakable and pliable and torn open and mended
There is nothing about you that seems rock solid: not even the ground
And everything around you is bleeding
Spirit, soul: who even are you?

And it just echoes
How hard you are
How hard it is
How hard everyone else has had to work to look at you in the light of the morning
All you wanted was not to be alone sleeping
Not to be afraid at night
Have someone who always wanted to share a cup of coffee when you're both tired

It feels like everything, everything is ending

Why?

Why were you taught to be soft if it isn't working
Maybe all those lessons in soft were just making it harder for everyone

I don't know what I'm seeking
And I don't know if I'll ever find it
But the way this sky opens itself up to the punctures of stars I feel like nothing could ever be bigger than the moon and that hole just keeps bending, moving oceans, moving old people in nursing homes, and school children: big hard rock making everything move without meaning to...

I am sorry
I am sorry
I am sorry for the pliable aching hardness caused by everything around me
Inside I still feel like a small animal: early, still wet with the water of its mother. So soft. And small.

But

 you can break me.

Glass: hard
Rock: hard
Windows: hard
Jolly Ranchers: hard
Theoretical Physics when you are in the second grade: hard

...

Hard things break.
I can't stop breaking.

When I am On Fire

Sometimes
It is good
To re-ignite your anger.

People tell you anger is unhealthy
Anger is a secondary emotion
Anger is something to be suppressed
But let's be real
When it comes to Kurdish children burning alive and Donald Trump existing and the way you post "cutie pie" memes on your new girlfriend's page I think anger is
Justified.

I had lulled myself into believing our friendship was a valuable something
And my therapist said you're choosing to be in relationship with me
And that's why you keep on texting
But I'm starting to think
Just maybe you just like me as your emotional chopping block
As your test subject for your puns
As your liability issue
As your means to instantaneous jealousy from other women
As your toolbox of bullshit
As your crazy ex-girlfriend - so easy to access
As the one who has the studio in her basement and you had an agreement that you could always use it even though you dumped her

So I open up your Facebook page and I see her little heart reacts and I see you posting clickbait for her
And all those other girls who don't know about her
And I remember that feeling of fucked up-ness you made me feel
All those months almost a year ago now and
How I felt it the whole time we were together
And how you bent me like an old wire hotel hanger into knots I didn't know about and couldn't untangle because metal begets metal and wire hangers don't bend all the time like rope instead, eventually, they break

I think you want to break me.

Maybe that's why I'm still agreeing to meet you at the coffee shop.

Maybe I think I deserve to be broken.

Maybe I need you to bend me just a bit more

Maybe not.

Maybe I want to see how you wiggle when my bones don't dance the way you imagined
How you squirm when I stand over you and the tiny table in the back of the place you know I hate but it's her favorite
Maybe I'll order quiche because I know you hate it
Maybe
Anger
Is unhealthy
But sometimes I need to light it up again
Chew it up thoroughly and spit it right at you
Because I can't go on feeling these primary emotions
Hurt
Pain
Despair
Confusion
Upheaval
That's what you want from me and Anger
Can sit inside and boil
Anger can crown me Queen of my Everything
Anger can get me through with a smile on my face and you none the wiser
Anger hides like tears don't let you
Anger is under the mask I put on so easily

Remember how I shared about my abusive childhood
You didn't get to get angry when your father would slap you and your mother would mourn and hide in the bathroom
You got through with a whip smart dialogue and a pasted on grin and it didn't matter what was under it to them but what was under it kept you alive.
Kept you unblinking
Kept your wits about you
Kept you faster thinking
Kept you missing being swatted like so many flies
You can't be a fly
When you're the whole damn cake on which they're feasting
I don't smear though
I'm not fresh icing
I've had a whole lifetime to get thicker
So sweet you can't taste me
Too hard to get to the inside

I'll meet you for coffee.
I'll meet you.

A Childhood Sort of Memory

I want to forget about you.

About my anxiety that you haven't texted me back:

[response to my angry text this morning...]

[was it warranted? probably yes...]

But the truth is
I can't forget.
I think about it.

You slice me up like the cheap-ass hot dogs my mother used to slice into my Kraft mac n'cheese.

Diced up coin shaped pieces of mystery meat dropping into a mass of noodles,
Smaller and smaller til there's nothing left of the original sausage,
Disappearing into your packaged powdered blue-boxed orange-y plastic cheese-goo.

BPD

The horror is staring at you through the window of your workplace and knowing
You didn't have the strength to comb your hair today.

The horror is that I know the new girl is just a drug now,
But you'll need her soon, and she'll turn into a legitimate something.

The horror is that the same mental illness that makes it so you can't miss me
Is the same mental illness that made you end things.

The horror is that you were just a child when all of it began for you
You had no say over it.

You struggled to make eggs for yourself in the microwave and you
Got nothing but slapped for it.

You struggled to defend yourself against a stepfather twice your size in both height and breadth
And you were the one they threatened with a prison sentence

Fourteen is too young for fighting
Fourteen is too young for wielding a piece of cement against a full grown man

Five is too young to watch your father carried out of anywhere in a body bag
Five is too young to understand why this year your mother tried but she couldn't afford a Christmas present

The horror is that this Christmas you will still believe you never got one before
That your girlfriend is the first person to buy you anything even though you have proof all around of the people who love you.

The horror is that you will never fully feel it.
You will never fully know.
The icy coldness of alone will consume you because you cannot sit down and work through a workbook
Or trust a therapist
Or spill your guts truly forth to anyone without changing your mind in the morning

The horror is how so many would pour out their blood for you
Your brothers in arms
Your exes
Your admirers messaging your Instagram daily

I just.

They told me to write a poem to perform about horror
For the macabre variety show
And the scariest thing I thought of
Was what it must feel like inside your brain.

Burdens

Yesterday a dump truck came to the empty lot across the street
And dumped fifty massive boulders onto the earth.
As they crashed from truck to ground the house shook,
The dog barked: a catastrophic sound.

When I looked out the window at the giant pile this morning I thought:
It must weigh many tons,
The earth should have caved in,
And swallowed them -
So heavy...
And I thought,

The heart is like that:
The Human Heart:
It bears such loads:
It carries all of humanity -
And does not swallow it,

It holds.