my heart is a mausoleum
a secret sepulchre
hidden beneath layers of tissue
muscle and blood and bone
tangled vines and twisted branches
conceal its entryway
a dark, warm, bloody vault
never suffused by sunlight
pulsating… vibrating… rhythm
behind fleshy, bleeding gates
my most sacred treasure lies
and breathes, and laughs, and loves evermore
it is you,
it is you,
it is you.
I love history.
I love the stars.
I love language.
I love theory, hypothetical, legend, ideas, possibility.
I love a good strong Irish breakfast tea, slow brewed and then poured over ice.
I love nostalgia.
I love old books.
I love when a person’s eyes crinkle at the corners when they smile.
I love photographs.
I love freckles.
I love laughter.
I love discipline. I love spontaneity. I love contradiction.
I love the way my sons can give themselves over completely to a giggle.
I love family.
I love sunrise at the beach.
I love curiosity, and questions, and the quest that comes before the answers.
I love an underdog story.
I love baking.
I love nature.
I love poetry.
I love music.
I love secrets, and stories, and reasons.
I love delicate, precious, intricate things.
I love.
I love.
I love.
I imagine a rope
Thick, braided, coarse
Connecting us at the center
It’s been pulling me since you left
What are you doing over there
That makes my stomach lurch
In the middle of the night?
What kind of mischief are you up to
That makes me yearn for unknown places?
In the moments it pulls less,
Are you closer to me?
When I get sick over you
Are you at universe’s edge?
One day when it’s time,
Will you tug on your side of the rope
And lead me back to you?
I imagine a rope
Thick, braided, coarse
Connecting us at the center
You guiding me,
Crying and laughing with me still
And I hang on.
Tonight I saw Copernicus,
The Monarch of the Moon
And near him,
The jagged Grimaldi Basin
This Full Moon Splendor
Like lightning in my veins
All the ones before me
Stargazers, astronomers,
Witches, explorers
Philosophers, rebels
Poets and kings
Are with me in spirit
I stand where they stood
I see through their eyes.
I am breathless
Intoxicated
Alive.
I am alive.
I think the same thoughts every day:
This is going to kill me if I let it.
Should I let it?
Then I get up, and live, and contemplate the difficulty versus the value
of living the next day.
It hasn’t killed me. Not yet,
not because I haven’t let it, really,
more likely it’s biding time. It’s to be torture rather than
anything quick.
Make me sick
With grief, with agony, with regret
It hasn’t killed me
but it feels every day like it will,
like it’s holding me
over a ledge, and I am waiting, indifferent, to fall.
To die.
Hanging here, still alive,
a new version of myself.
Not whole, not really recognizable.
Flayed wide open, for everyone to see
The breathing, bleeding dead.
A cautionary tale, a smiling, achieving, happy and gleaming
yet somehow
morbid and macabre display
Come one, come all,
Step right up you curious gawkers
Grievers, disbelievers
Step right up today
Come and see the girl who didn’t love her father
enough
for him to stay.
Would you be my pen pal?
Scratch some ink across a page for me and
Make it mean something.
Decorate the margins with hearts and flowers and
Your deepest secrets.
I want to trace the words engraved there, interpret them
With my fingertips,
Touch them to my lips
I want to read the silly thoughts and
Obsessive machinations
You’ve only ever whispered to your dog
Would you trust me with it?
To sit,
To hold it close, reading each line again and again
Until I can recite the words,
Absorbing all that you would pour out
Into my hands.
At night, when I’m alone,
I think about dying
In the morning I pretend to fly
In the day time I am half asleep
When it’s dark I can’t close my eyes
I beg you to come to my dreams
And when the dreams come
I crumble
You feel so real.
I’m paralyzed
Disoriented, disjointed, too quiet, too loud, too
e m p t y.
So
At night, when I’m alone,
I think about dying.
I wonder if I will always be like this –
More the sorrow than the person who feels it
More the wound than the soul enduring it
More the remnants
Than any semblance
Of myself.
Walking back into the office from lunch
My hair looks good today
It’s warm out.
I like warm better than cold.
Suddenly, I have a flashback to
The moment I found out
After midnight, groggy
Falling to my knees in bullet-time
Screaming for him until
No more sound would come out
Dad. My dad. Daddy.
I am learning to put that in its place
At work, I think about work
With the kids, I focus on the moment
I am strict with myself.
Keep this here, keep that over there
To stay sane.
(Am I sane?)
Later, in the afternoon
I have to talk with my older son
About his grades
He is gifted, brilliant,
And failing.
And I hear myself saying,
It can’t be an excuse from now on
It can’t be the reason
We don’t try
This horrible thing has happened to us
and now we quit?
No, that isn’t who we are.
(Am I a hypocrite?)
This is the trickiest thing to navigate
This hollow in our once-whole
A striking silence in our song
We stumble forward
Hoping
To live each day in such a way that
He’d be proud
Or at least, to keep it in its place
For now.
You’re the home I always came back to.
The solid foundation, the roots, the teacher whose words echoed in my thoughts and informed my decisions.
The warm, comforting place I could come to for respite, to laugh, to eat a good hearty meal, enjoy a story about the old days, and even just to hide for a while from everything outside.
When I missed home, I was missing you. When I talked about home, I saw your face. When I told people about where I’m from, it was you I described.
I feel homeless. A vagabond. Wandering. Lost. Disoriented.
Condemned.
A mess of a thing, a remnant, vaguely recognizable as that girl who lived in that big house up the hill for a while.
I lie here, on the grass where we used to lie together, wondering when the ground beneath me might open wide and swallow me up.
I hope it’s soon.
Attitude Soup 