A Pale Scrawl
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

A bee in every blossom

10/9/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A bee in every blossom
Sluggish in the strange October warmth
They want to be done
Just as much as they need to keep gathering
Bright pollen clinging to their legs


Though not yet showing signs of approach
The winter will come
Stealing the heat from the sun
From their hive
From the delicate fuzz
Of their impossibly round bodies and
Delicately veined wings


It will cling icily to bare trees
Brown grass
The edges of everything


I watch them now
The bees
Tasting the salt of wasted months
Trailing down my cheeks
Mourning a summer that wasn’t
Feeling a cold that isn’t yet here
Letting go of the hopes I held
Foolishly clutched to my chest
Giving them to the wind
Like milkweed feathers
Leaving me a curled husk
My bared insides pale




0 Comments

Poison and preservative

10/4/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
I can’t let go of your lies
Bad apples in the bunch
Gathered in the scoop of my shirt
Always threatening to fall


So glad I didn’t share
They tasted no different
In hindsight, perhaps a touch sweeter
Not enough to draw further suspicion


I know them now
Refusing to rot like the rest
Shining red and inviting
These last years
Deception both a poison and preservative


I can’t ask why you gave them to me
Having already been explained
But I ate them, you see
And I don’t feel well
Perhaps a touch lethargic
Like I could sleep for a hundred years


Kissing a prince won’t save me
That’s how I got here








0 Comments

Never a bottle

9/30/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
We kill ourselves
In the pursuit of perfection
Because we’ve been told
All our lives
That if we work hard enough
We can have anything we want


We don’t want to be who we are
No matter how kind
Or loving
Or giving
Or fair
We want to be somebody else


What would we accomplish
If we shared the message
That kind
And loving
And giving
And fair
Are enough?
That beauty manifests itself in those acts?
What if we said
You can only have your body
And it is uniquely yours
Beautiful and worn
As sea glass?
What if we allowed ourselves to feel it?
Rather than telling everyone else


I waste time
And energy
Being unkind
Unloving
Ungiving
Unfair
To myself
For things I cannot change
For damage I didn’t do
For being a bottle thrown into the waves
Tossed
Broken
Gloss dulled


I was never a bottle
But flesh
Soft
Rounded
Marked by sharp edges and words
I work to undo it all
To unfight the battles I’ve won or lost
To make firm my softness
Camouflage my me-ness
To be someone else
Something else
Another battle already lost
Knowing it might kill me






0 Comments

Plain and porous

9/21/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Pen in hand
I sat down at the table
And I wrote you a letter
Whether from nerves or lack of habit
I shook
Ink clinging to my skin
As it dragged across the page

When I was done
I wondered if I'd said the right things
In the right way
I laid it down
Reluctant to seal the envelope
To lick the glue that could be our undoing
But I did
Because you say you want me as I am
And I am smeared ink, shaking, clumsy

Some minutes later
A bowl chipped
I thought I was being careful
Stacking it with another
But the right angle
The right force
The right moment
And there was ceramic between my toes
Its core bare
Plain and porous bone
Beneath a cobalt glaze


Sadness replaced my fear
Because the bowl had been his
Bought in preparation for his first apartment
It survived beyond six moves
Seventeen years
Our marriage
And its ending
I hope he didn't want it back
Though he's stopped asking for things
When he learned I'd no longer give them










0 Comments

The corpse flower

8/16/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
The corpse flower of American hatred
Blooms once in a generation
Making people of sound mind
Pinch their noses
And curl their lips in primitive disgust

It began with ourselves
Borne across the Atlantic on the Mayflower
Claiming a desire for religious freedom
Succeeding where Jamestown failed

They slaughtered the ones who lived here
With muskets and diseased blankets
Making children their brides
And driving the unwilling onto reservations
Where they still live impoverished today
We let them have casinos
Tell them they're sovereign nations
But we'll pollute what we've given them for oil

Almost simultaneously
We began abducting Africans
By the shipload
Exploiting tribal warfare
For our national gain
Slaves built the White House
Now the home of a veritable Klansman

Thinking ourselves on the right side of history
We sent thousands of young men
To die in Asia
Claiming a fight against Communism
When really it was just an excuse
To kill more poor brown people
But it was just a conflict
War never officially declared
We built The Wall for our dead
Grieved another lost generation
And moved on

The Quran was the next evil
A branch of the same tree
From which Judaism and Christianity grow
Seen as diseased
It had to be cut off
When it was we who'd armed them
Fed their radicalization
Crying foul when they defended themselves
Against the mightiest nation's renewed assault

We sit now smelling what we planted
Four hundred years ago
Watering the soil with the blood of the other
Blood is thicker than water
It rots, too
I don't know what we expected
From roots dug so deeply in hatred






0 Comments

What I've done, what I can't do

8/15/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture
I am sitting here right now thinking about how far I've come and how hard I've worked in such a contracted period of time. I had no deadline, no concrete goals to achieve or exceed, but it's a lot, and it's been fast. In under two years, I lost an entire adult's worth of weight, I got divorced, I crawled out of debt and into enough savings to last me months should I become unemployed. I was promoted twice, started living alone, bought a car, began and ended relationships that I thought were fine but weren't. I learned to set boundaries and declare their violations. I spat in the eye of decades of abuse, and told them they weren't allowed to control me anymore. Looking back at it all from this chair in front of this window, I don't know how I managed. It was all encompassing chaos, and I was in the middle of it without a way to sidestep.


I've done all these things, but I still have so far to go, and it's daunting. I should be celebrating my achievements, but I'm still beating myself up for the ones I haven't made yet. I have an impossible time asking for what I want. It's even harder to ask for what I need. I release the words with a cringe because I expect "no" to come in the form of a lengthy and painful argument when all I wanted to do was talk. I am acutely, paralytically afraid of losing people important to me by exposing that I can't always do everything myself, and that vulnerability gnaws in the middle of the night. I do not want to need or crave basic comfort, to admit I ache with it because I'm supposed to be able to do and handle anything. In so many ways, I'm still six years old figuring out that the world doesn't want me but still wanting it back.


I go through these exhaustive self examinations because I know I can be better. I refuse to accept that I am irreparably broken, but deeply know that I am. I may never trust anyone fully again. I might always look for the lies buried in a perceived half truth, sniffing out the rot in every omission. I will get searingly, shockingly angry at my insecurities and cry myself to sleep because you made me feel them. By my own measure, I simply can't compete, and I can't settle for good as I am. I can never be proud of myself or accept an earnest compliment. My imperfections hurt as they echo in my chest.


So much is easy for me. I need only be shown a task before I can master it. But getting out of bed, planting my feet on the floor, those are hard every single day because I know I need to keep looking inside and trying to fix me.
1 Comment

Only a fool would buy it

8/11/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Pain slips in
Through the edges
Of the windows
In the house that love built
Settling cold and heavy
In my bones
I ache with the burden
Wishing I could burn and banish it


But I know
It's impossible
To have one without the other
To seal the cracks is to suffocate
And I still want to breathe
Affection and ache
ebb and flow
Unceasing as the tides
Covering and exposing me
Without a moon to govern
Or an almanac to consult


You cannot sell
The house that love built
It's held in perpetual trust
And only a fool would buy it


0 Comments

O Captain, my Captain

8/10/2017

0 Comments

 
O Captain, My Captain!


If I'd been thinking straight, I'd have stood up on the conference room table and shouted it. But I wasn't thinking straight. Instead, I was tapping Robert lightly on the shoulder to ask for tissues. In a way, I haven't stopped since, and it's been almost three days. Another coworker, sitting two chairs away, and whom I've always thought odd, rolled her chair over to me to put an arm around me. I wasn't the only one crying, but I was the only one doing it silently, letting the blow land, absorbing every pound of force behind the impact, anticipating the bruise. I don't cry in front of people. It's not my way. And I tried so hard not to, but this was too much to hear even though I'd known it was coming for hours ahead of time.


On Tuesday morning, they fired my boss. The words don't seem like much. So what? People leave or get fired all the time. This is different. This is the result of petty, vindictive people acting in their own self interest and saying to hell with the rest of them, and I know who did it. I figured it out a long time ago. Before it even happened. Because I know people. I see the quality of their souls even when they try to hide them. It's my superpower, and while I use it all the time, I rarely unleash its full power. When you know what makes someone tick, you also know what will stop their clock. I want to stop this clock. I want to take my knowledge of this person and spill it blackly over them, sticky and suffocating. People don't like the truth - especially when it's their own - when they've worked so hard to maintain a veneer so shiny it blinds even them in the mirror. I've been gracious, polite, helpful, and kind to this person. Fuck grace. When they return, they will find me cold and unyielding. They may find us all so.


So, what's the big deal? Can't I separate the personal from the professional? Ordinarily, yes. There are exceptions to every rule, and this one's been broken. Professionally, my boss raised me up, gave me my voice back, supported me, advocated for me, and listened. She was mentor, ally, confidante, and cheerleader. She found problems, and ways to solve them, by never ceasing to ask why until it was over. She did that for all of us. We'd been told previously not to ask questions, to trust the system, to accept what was as it was even while everything was wrong. It sat badly with me, and I was disciplined twice for being vocal, so I stopped talking. Personally, she texted me photos of her cats, of her beer, of her adult daughter napping on the couch. She invited me to Thanksgiving with her family when I was an orphan. She knew almost everything, and she was my friend.


My heart is broken, and my job will soon become intolerable. She was the only thing keeping me here, and the wolf in sheep's clothing has taken her from me. I will wait a while for personal reasons, but I will leave, and I will take my inconceivable talent with me because she was the only one able to conceive it. She wants me to go. She wants me to stop being Robin Hood, taking money from an industry I oppose, and do something I love because she believes I can succeed in anything. She's a soul-seer like me, but she overlooks the worst of someone, and this undid us all. I don't blame her. I admire her hope. She's been so apologetic, and I won't allow her to bear this. Nobody will.


O Captain, my Captain! I love you.
0 Comments

Both in a breath

7/25/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
We are taught to use our words
The lie of sticks and stones
While bone heals
More readily than soul


I can craft a compliment
From consonants and vowels
Punctuated with love
Just as much as I am able
To forge a sword in hatred
Sharpened on the stone of my rage


I can cure or cut with the assembly of syllables
I have done both in a breath
But it is in my silence where the volumes speak
Verbs in a vacuum
Sucked up and away
That you know I am lost to you
0 Comments

Widespread and weightless

7/19/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
We arrive here as beings
Bound by stardust
The breaths follow
Loudly expressing our disconsolacy

Torn from the sky
Thrust into a loud, bright world
When all we knew
Was a subtly thrumming darkness

We want to go back
Some part of us
Always wishing for what was lost
To be made particulate and floating again
Or perhaps it's just me
Desperate for the simplicity of aimlessness

The pressure of goals
The complexity of wholeness
Held here by gravity

My cells remember
When I was widespread and weightless
I must remind them I am temporary
This time of jostling and bustle
Will end more quickly than it began

They will be free to roam again
Many years from now
When I am gone
Having been here sufficiently long
To begin asking for release
From the bonds that held so fast

My memories and those of me will fade
Dispersed to wind and waves
Absorbed eventually elsewhere
In someones and somethings else












0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Archives

    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact