Category Archives: Poetry

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Clocked

Lonely even when you’re in the room,

and at last I know why.

The next moment arrives on a clock that has been taken apart

and put back together

It ticks, tocks, and stops.

The air goes out of the room, and out of me;

And there you go again – always one second away from gone.

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Measuring out life with coffee spoons (courtesy of T.S. Eliot)

It’s Friday, and I swear this week has gone by in a nanosecond.  I’ve had the week off, and left to my own devices, have the following to show for it – a clean truck, a fairly clean dog, an almost clean carpet, and yet another scarf that is ten inches (plus fringe) away from being finished (my deadline for said scarf is December 1st, and I will be meeting that date, or I might as well pack my needles away and be done with it, since it’s been a year since I started the thing).  I also started the latest Stephen King novel, “11/22/63,” which has me hooked as only SK can, but with my ADD, which is pretty much full-blown these days, who knows how long it will take me to finish it? I heard a great line last week that stayed with me: “It’s not what you start, it’s what you finish.”

Right now I’m finishing a nice little glass of red wine; I have given up just about all of my vices, except for coffee, knitting, and Angry Birds, but tonight I found a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter, and since it is Friday, and I’m still on vacation…oh, whatever, I’m having it, who cares why?  It’s a big glass of delicious –

I’m feeling scattered right now, like I’m paying more attention to the little things, and not focusing on the larger picture known as “My Life” (now in 3-D and Imax!). Since they just popped into my head,  I also think that the two lines from the poem by T.S. Eliot , “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” apply to me right now:

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floor of silent seas.”

Moving forward to survive, unfocused, without clarity – sounds about right.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of my favorites; for me, the magic of poetry is that each time I read a poem, I find something new in it. “Love Song” details the minutiae of a man’s life, and his attempt to find some significance in those details, and his realization that he has lost his true self somewhere. The perfect checklist for me tonight – “There will be time, there will be time/to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” “And time yet for a hundred decisions and indecisions/And for a hundred visions and revisions/before the taking of toast and tea.”

Go ahead, read Eliot’s poem a few times, and see what you find out about yourself. I triple dog dare you …!

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Lost cause

I would prefer

that you not try to save me – I will swim against the current of your selfish heroism

and into the undertow, just to get away

Save it for someone who still has a chance – for me, to steal a line:

“It has all been measured, and found wanting”… so I will keep, until I sleep,

returned to the waves, ashes floating out to sea.

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Legacy

I was born ready to crack on both sides;

Sleeping, I dream of hospitals with locked doors,

Whispering and stares

Of confusion;

Waking too soon, I hear them

Ghosts in the hall, coming to visit;

It is their destiny to haunt me

And mine to be haunted.

I am made of

Giant hazel eyes, olive skin, and something more;

(Sylvia Plath wrote of it) –

Tiny black birdwings under my skin, brushing up against

Hot, sparking electric nerve wires

Threaded through thick boiling blood

Poured from the madness of the Greeks

And the lost and wandering, twice-orphaned one –

Grandfather, grandfather, and grandmothers two,

Whatever I am

I am also you.

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High-wire

He always kisses like it’s the first time,

and maybe the last time;

She knows it could be, and yet

She holds her balance, and walks the tightrope,

doing flips, always landing right side up,

knowing that to stay on the wire keeps him watching,

courts immortality,

and keeps her from falling into a finite sea.

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What if…

Enveloped in those two words – they cling like cigar smoke,

Whispering from a fat stogie wedged between two fingers: “What if? What if?”

Curling, unfurling, sliding over my skin until I can’t sit still any longer –

They beckon me to believe in them, to trust them, to spend time with them,

and when I surrender to them, they disappear

leaving the air no more clear than before they were here.