Who's to Say

Battered woman

It is not a moniker that applies to me

I tell myself.

I have not been hit or hurt

or beaten into submission.

The slow neglect was consistent,

till I was ground down

from diamond to dust.

He never needed to put

a bullet through the heart,

there are more ways to skin a cat

than heaven ever dreamed of.

Memory

They don’t come back like you think they will,

the memories.

Not like flashing images in a kids’ flipbook

or photos in a faded album, or an 8mm home movie.

Bruises on shoulders, swollen genitals

skin eyeshadow blue and concord-grape purple

arm frozen into an L for for days together

pain that you have not known even in childbirth

drowning in terror without end.

And always always the infernal itching on your back

which you cannot reach, or get respite from.

Tongue Lashing

His small soft penis

infecting my small soft mouth

holding down my small strong tongue

into silence.

It speaks now, this tongue, stronger

than any manhood or fatherhood he claimed.

Gray Feline Beauty

My caged Rage

paces behind the bars

of rules and indignities

made by the same tormentor.

Her gray sinewy body

is Michelangelo's Panther.

Wordless, she taunts me

calling me names

which I would never use for myself.

She does not believe

I am strong enough

to love her.

But when I reach in

to show her, stroke her

She licks herself.

Her bars melt to butter

covering her in a cloudburst of yellow,

as she continues to lick the butter

till it turns into the Sun.

Golden sunlight soaked

she shines, glowing from within.

Finally, she sits

majestic and free

holding my hand in hers.

We are more than strong enough.

My Body has a Mind of its Own

The more my mind forgot, the harder my body has remembered.

For no reason that any doctor who has ever seen me can diagnose

my body breaks into a song and dance that they cannot understand.

For no reason at all

my crotch smells of semen after months of celibacy.

For no reason at all

the creases in my pits, both arms and legs, for days turn redder than a langur butt.

For no reason at all

bruises that look like honeycombs take up residence for months on my shoulders and back.

For no reason at all

I smell like feces, and long dead relatives.

Since the doctors cannot figure out

what my body is trying to tell them, I guess I will do it myself.

Because there is a reason, after all.

The 2001 Series

The Road to Nowhere

Why is it when I was lost
I felt no misdirection at all
only panic filling my lungs with every breath.
And having found finding myself, alone,
surrounded by unknown uncharted terrain
I am filled with wonder and joyful refrain.


I didn’t know that I was lost

I didn’t know that I was lost.
In intimate rooms, filled with memory laden walls
on floors stained with hunger and desire
I felt empty yet complete.
On familiar streets, chasing adulation
giving my all, being one with all I touched
I felt hollow yet replete.
In homes and conversations
always the center of attention

loud, brassy, bright and always right
I felt the ground parting beneath my feet.
Thinking myself prone to maladies from allergies to depression
I re-enforced my crumbling mind
with food, neglect, and damn the cost
And now I find I didn’t know that I was lost.


Words Unwritten

Today I am throwing away the blank pages of my life.
Years of pages filled with silence
soaked red with unwritten pain.
The whites, the lined, the pastel hued,
the ones I had gathered to fill with my thoughts;
bound in leather or lying separate
sheet from sheet,
each accusing me of the emptiness in its life,
while my life fills, gorges, expands to bursting.
“Rainbow Scribblers” and “Ultra Brite Neons”
deprived of the touch of baby hands,
uncut into shapes to be pasted
or folded and molded to other delights.
Here, some determined to be acknowledged
my name on the letterhead boldly printed,
some with a logo of a dream aborted;
some faded with time, their dates barely breathing;
some loud in their prime, their days fairly trumpeting
looking ahead, to be filled, to be sated:
Naive with the wisdom of youth.

To Erma Bombeck

A mother - a writer once said to me “Do what will endure” and because she was of love and of good humor and because she was of joy and caring for un-met friends. I tried. Now I write and play with my child, who knows not of dirty dishes in the sink, unmade beds, bathtub ring, of dust collecting on oak and maple, of records clothed in other jackets, but gives me of herself her toothless smile and sometimes of her oatmeal.