Category Archives: poetry

Sometime between Wednesday and Thursday, I dreamed

my house was under siege.

I walked beside Hyppolita, discussing tactics

While burly men in furs and leather

Put out fires on my roof.

*

Sometime between Thursday and Friday, I dreamed

my father, and my grandfather (dead these many years)

walked side by side in the woods behind my house,

along the river, chatting and watching my grandson swim

close to the bank. Every once in a while,

Dad pulled William back from going too far. William, for his part

only laughed.

*

Sometime between Friday and Saturday, I dreamed

Chris was being held in a church, down on the Green.

The same church he used to attend AA meetings in.

They were holding him for execution,

because he’d overdosed. How ironic, that lethal injection.

Why? I screamed outside. Why are you doing this to him?

*

In the early hours of Saturday morning, I woke

confused, bolting out of bed so I could get to the church

before they killed my son. It took a few minutes

between sleep and awake

to realize I was still in bed,

in the early hours of a Saturday,

of this after, not the before.

*

I saw Wonder Woman on Wednesday

My grandson on Tuesday

On June 22, my son will be gone a full two years.

How the brain mashes up the everyday with

its inner-workings. How marvelous.

How utterly extraordinary.

I burn strange and silent words,

free of the memory manacle

certain to expose that holy rhythm,

the electric dance

imagined by my ghost.

Between dream end and story seed,

I howl genius,

whisper a precious curse

of truth bleeding time

from mind and bone and sleep.

TLD

It’s not that I think I could have saved you;

I’m not that much of a fool, or an

Optimist. Saving you was up to you, and

you fought really hard, but failed.

Or maybe death was your final success, in

freeing yourself of all the chains

binding you, holding you down, holding you back.

My failure isn’t not saving your twenty-five year old self

My failure happened ten years before, when you were

too young to know how wrong things could go;

when you depended upon me to make the right choices,

to know the right things, to

set the horror right. I tried. I was the one who was supposed to know

everything. And I didn’t.

**

If I could go back in time (I’ve thought of this a lot. Fool that I am)

I’d go back to that day, ten years prior, when I got to the school

and found you on the ground (the irony doesn’t escape me)

One leg a full half-foot shorter than the other. I leaned over you,

I smiled and stroked your face. “It’s going to be fine, sweetheart.”

The ambulance was on its way. It was a dislocation,

so much better than a break, right?

But it wasn’t, and it wasn’t. It was so much worse.

Too many hours lost. Too much damage done. Two percent chance of saving

that leg. That damned leg.

This what I’d change–I’d tell them to take it off.

What they left caused it all. I’m ninety-eight percent convinced.

It would have been done. Over. And only the rebuilding.

A new life you would have made without the constant drag

of all that pain,

that became pain-killers that didn’t work,

that fed all the sorrow of losing who you’d been,

that became so much anxiety,

that became a speeding train always barreling down,

that became “please someone save me!” That became

heroin.

This is what I’d change, if I could. But I can’t. Maybe,

in some postulated, parallel reality, I told them,

“Take the leg.” Not in this reality.

I lost you then, and didn’t even know, I, who was supposed to know

everything.

You were here; you were real.

I have to keep reminding myself.

Over and over. You were here;

you were real. It feels so strange

to know, and yet difficult to grasp.

I see your picture, my handsome son, or

that spot in the upstairs bathroom, the chemical

I can’t remove from the pedestal sink.

“I was here,” it tells me. “Don’t forget.”

Forgetting isn’t possible, but this fade…

This fade is intolerable. It makes the

sorrow hit harder when it comes, after

days of being kindly absent.

How can it be? How can it be!

You were here; you were real.

You were here; you were real.

Child of my body. Being of my blood.

My heart. My everything. And now

you’re gone and fading. Your presence

isn’t as strong upon the world you left behind,

or in dreams still connecting these planes we inhabit.

Until that curtain between sorrow and kindness falls

and you fly at me like bats from a cave

at sunset, in movies, in nature shows on television.

I open my arms and catch all of you I can, but

it’s never enough. I’m not fast enough, strong enough,

clever enough to trap so wild a being, one who

doesn’t want to be caught. You were here;

you were real. You were here;

you were real.

You were here. You were.

Weren’t you?

I’ve dreamed of you…

At first, the joy of freedom; and then

the sorrow for the grief you brought segued into

a smile, a nod, a shake of your head

to speak much more than words allow.

Always silent, yet I understood your conflict,

the push and the pull of wanting

to be here and there all at once.

*

Time, that human construct, is nothing.

A way to measure the span between

then and now; between

you breathing your first and

sighing your last; the span that

doesn’t measure in tears but in

click-ticks on a numbered face that become

hours in a day and days in a week,

weeks in months and years; in decades and centuries.

The sun’s path across the sky, chased

by Mother moon.

*

I dreamed of you…

They brought you to me, not your infant self

swaddled and seeking points of reference in your new world; but

fully grown, the man you were when you left.

You smiled at me. I wept my joy and

you held out your arms. You held me against your great chest,

in those strong arms heavy on my shoulders. My ear

pressed and listening for the heartbeat

once a whooshing jump-rope sound; once

a steady thump to reassure me through

the darkest of the dark.

There was only your weight,

your solidity, your smile. My trembling joy.

“Can you stay?” I asked. “Will they let you?”

“Yes, I think so.” But you shook your head, your smile saddened.

You stepped away, back into my brain wishing or the conduit

breaking; the connection unexplained, undiscovered

except in dreaming. The first contact in the span

measured only in tears.

TLD

Where are you now? Drifting through

another realm, a plane more suited

to who you are? Truly are, and not who you

were forced to be. The entity of thought,

of indefatigable brilliance. The one

whose darkness mingled and melded inside, yet

never dimmed the light.

*

Were you here at all? I see

your bows displayed on the wall,

the roof you built, covered in snow; I listen

to you sing inside my head, your song leaping synapses,

pulsing in my blood. The blood we shared

for a little while.

I put your boxing gloves on this morning,

to feel where your hands had been, knowing

the sweat still seeped inside. And then

I put them away, in the armoire storing

the blanket that still smells faintly of happier days.

*

Your influence is everywhere, still

helping those you loved, and those who

you never knew, but owe you a debt; because

they’re pain-free, they understand what was

formerly incomprehensible, they know how to soothe

the demons inside. Those demons you never could

vanquish completely. But you taught them.

You showed them how.

*

Sorrow grips me, this cold January day.

I pry its fingers loose, one at a time;

Peel them back like orange skin that leaves

bitter pith behind, the sweetness

still another layer deep.

It cannot swallow me whole.

I must allow its place, its space or

have it implode and hollow me of words, my joy

my solace, and sanity. Sanctity. Sanctuary.

TLD

(Thoughts this morning led this to that. I am in a contemplative mood, nothing more. I don’t want anyone reading this to fear for me. Once again, I thought about keeping this private, for exactly that reason, but I made a promise and I aim to keep it, so this stays public. That alone should put you at ease.)

When you find hair in the drain, whether

black, white or blue, you’ll wonder if it could be;

I tell you now, that will be me.

Bite at the inside of your cheek and feel

a tap on your hand, “Stop that,”

you’ll hear. That will be me.

Whenever you feel the urge to cut your hair

and hear a voice inside your head, “Let it grow,”

it wheedles. That will be me.

And when you see a turtle, or a camel,

in fact or in illustration, you will add a heart to it

and again, that will be me.

When words froth at your brain and you feel

the need to catch them,

by heart or by hand;

When you see a dragonfly and call it fairy, a baby dragon

in an anole; when a beam of sunlight becomes a path to another world,

That will be me.

When friends drop by and you need to feed them, when baby monkeys

make you cry; when you smell onions sauteing in olive oil, and fear choking on pudding.

Me, me, they are all me.

Such ties don’t break when life does.

They simply change shape and form.

It won’t matter if whatever is left of me once life has spit me out

is riding the ether of some astral plain, Or

simply the echo of what once was, what I was.

It will be me, like it is him.

I hear him whistle;

and sing. All the time

I see him smile;

and shake his head.

I feel his joy, and his despair that

share time in his space, even now.

Spirit or memory, there is no cognitive difference when

love is at the core. Love,

and need; love and

the hubris to believe there is

more to existence than life.

~TLD

(This is a weird one. I’m not sure what it even is. Don’t read too much into it.)

My spine stays stiff, arms open wide

My shoulders are boulders, my brain mostly fried

I’m a locket in a pocket

Care to see it? What’s inside?

It’s a heart, and not a picture.

One bleeding as it pumps.

Stand back, watch it bump

disrupted feelings to the ceilings

Hear it tHuMp, ThUmP, ThuMp

Healing reality, the newest casualty

On this train ride in my mind, so unkind

Stay behind, or take this ride to the end

Round the bend, watch me rend

My eyeballs from their sockets.