Scissors

I need to find the scissors!
They always disappear
Empty is the kitchen drawer
(where they were shut
out of sight, out of mind
until I wanted to sever
or clip,
to permanently rend
in a second’s snip)

Someone is resistant!
To cutting and cleaving,
Slicing asunder
Or slashing to slits;
To splice is more polite
To reassemble, build, combine

But I must find those scissors.
To chop and piece (I need)
To strips and bits the old—
Confetti to throw up, to float and fly
(I need)
To fall into the future

good penny

You keep turning up
In my dreams
Where we star together in
Scenes from a sentimental movie—
I’m the quirky heroine
You’re my indie hero
And we’re famously in love . . .
But it’s not you,
Just a shiny doppelganger
Not tarnished by bitterness
Or intimacy-dulled at the edges;
Crisp, new, and bright
Heads up
For good luck,
Just a good penny
That keeps turning up

Live at the --

Strangers’ bodies bumping
Elbows in the spine
Mobs of unknown people
Restless feet in lines

Rows of human wheat
Transplanted in strange soil
Swaying together through the heat
Distinct as water and oil

To step on one another’s toes
And splash a stranger with their beer
To talk in someone else’s ear
And share their sweat and who knows what else
And push and grumble and stare
Trying not to acknowledge the ones with whom they’re sharing air
Feeling dirty, sweaty, and abused

Until the gods appear!
To strum a chord, and beat the drums,
And play to appease the hoard
Who sings and worships to and fro
Still bumping into those they do not know

Clutter

Shards of paper
Shreds of glass
Seeing through a window
Clouded by the past

Weightiness of pages
Crusty residue of thoughts
Expanse of brave, clear future
Encroached by emptiness


Trying to distill the uncatchable,
The irretrievable,
Trying to ignore the ever-present;
Paradoxes of crowded loneliness
And frantic apathy,
"Heavy lightness
And serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms";
Too tired to be young
Too careless to be old


Wet cloth, rubbish bin, and broom
Cleaning up and clearing out
But making no more room

Finding Ophelia

Certainly not kin
But more than kind?
Did she give it all away
And lose her mind?

Clean white Styrofoam boxes
Folded into themselves
Lining the shelves,
Neat and sterile as hospital supplies,
Lonely as a castle lookout;
Souvenirs of nights away
Forgetting father’s pressure;
Brother’s absence and hypocrisy;
Her proverbial prison of gilded walls.
Protected yet prevented
From living.

He charmed the ear, the lips,
The mind, the blushing vanity—
A promising escape
From another soul not free.
Something special with this take-home box,
Closed for once with tenderness.
A way out?
A newfound prison?
A true love?

It matters not
For now none of them care
They’re crazy, gone, or dead.
They only wanted to pull the strings,
Puppet their madness
Till it seeped down and down
And into her heart, too.

Something is rotten
The flowers will mask it
Fresh fragrance
To cover the death,
The deception,
The fact she’s been abandoned.

The water, the flowers
The rotten, the un-kind
Life and death
Cage and kisses
Lost, lost, lost

Loving men, and used by them
Left trapped and naked under suits of woe
Perpetually mourning and already dead is
Not to be—
For her, they left no question

To thine ownself be true:
Woman thy name is not frailty
It is kindness in an un-kind world.

Existential Punctuation

I'm beginning to use the ellipsis
as Emily Dickinson wielded the dash . . .

If she was hesitant, abrupt—
emphatic
—strong-willed.

What am I? diffident, dallying . . .
dismissive
. . . dubious?

Punctuation says so very much.
It says so very much?
It says, “so very much!”
It says . . .
what we want—
it to say.

White Fang in the Washroom

Sometimes
When I brush my teeth
The toothpaste foam overflows
The basin of my mouth,
Just at the sides,
Dribbling down in frothy tears
Like drops of blood or fangs.
I flash a sinister smile in the mirror;
I am a peppermint, fluoride vampire.