Sadly, sadly singing
in some soft apartment,
underground, snowed over.
White noise: fridge hum
and soft electric buzz.
You are at work, and I
am humming too, to
make my presence known.
I put the dishes away,
pick off the bits that stayed behind,
reheat my coffee
and sit in front of my screen
to scroll through job boards
and look, again, for some cash register to work.
Last night, I dreamt I had it:
an old job I quit years ago. In it,
I remembered just where to stock
specific housewares and what their codes were.
Perhaps I should have stayed there
and become the old woman
who kept her first job forever,
knew everything,
let complaints roll off her back,
and went about her business
rolling her eyes at young management
day dreaming and scheming, alive
and thriving on minimum wage.
Tag: poet
Sheltered Kid at a Cat Funeral
My mother insisted the cat be buried
but we had no land of our own
so I paid a man to box her up, laughing,
under a tree he had grown.
The burial took too long for my liking.
My mother, too sad to appear.
“From ashes to ashes, dust to dust” –
The cat doesn’t know we are here!
The cat had been loved more than she could handle
and rode that wave into the sky.
Her heart was enlarged with it, that’s why she left us
alone, just my mother and I.
Of course I don’t blame her, for mom’s love was stifling.
The cat and I lived much the same.
We well-kept possessions, we beautiful playthings,
too precious to go up in flames.
keeping records
Does my father have friends?
Once, he spoke of a college friend
now lost to another city, to whom
his record collection was promised in death.
How I wanted his records.
Does my father know how I in those small years
wanted to be his friend?
Did he carry it with him,
my wide-eyed admiration,
when he journeyed out to Home Depot
selling floors to put a roof over us?
Did he have friends there?
Did his coworkers – most half his age –
extend their hands in comradery to him?
Sometimes he showed me his record collection.
Perhaps he was just listening and I, just there.
To me, it seemed an occasion:
reaching back with Dark Side, Tommy, Sgt. Pepper.
Voices sounding from somewhere far beyond
yet not too grand to fill the space between us
in a cigarette smoked room.
When I listen to the same albums now
I tear through the lyrics for hidden lessons,
proverbs I pretend he meant to lend me.
How I wanted his records
but I have never asked for them
and he has never offered.
Both of us are too embarrassed
and the records, apathetic and warping.
I navigate new friendships now,
out in the world but mostly alone.
Once, days before I was to move out,
he put on She’s Leaving Home, Lonely Hearts again.
What did we do that was wrong?
It goes: We didn’t know it was wrong.
The girl in the song leaves home anyway.
Of course I know he didn’t know.
I do not hold it against him.
Unclaimed Evenings
I want to dissolve into our bed and into you
blend into the fibres, into your pores,
particles flush with particles in the dark.
No more of this —
operating a metal machine to
move my body where it doesn’t want to be, to
carve a life out of busywork.
The planet is dying, and the lifetime
you and I roughly share isn’t guaranteed
to say nothing of our smallness
within our planet’s smallness
within our solar system’s smallness.
What I mean is,
I no longer have the capacity to think about my credit score.
The universe experiencing itself experiences
lunch n learns, the DMV, conferences, car trouble.
And how quickly I forget, how chronically,
that I am here and your are here in bed
and no one attempts to steal our labour away
all night.
I am here, and you are here.
What fragile, abused creatures we all are.
I am here, and you are here.
If the sun comes up tomorrow, I will try
to remember that.
Snabitat
Water droplets on plastic
A carrot
A piece of cuttlebone
The snail I found in an apple crate
Seems to be doing alright
In the habitat I set up for him.
It has been nice to have something to take care of
While I wait for my third mental health assessment
And try to decide what to tell them.
Semi-employed at a fruit stand
Previously over-employed at two service jobs
My slow days come at a cost;
You can only claim so much welfare.
The snail gets what she needs
Because I like to watch her glide around.
If only I could glide similarly
And hang upside down from a plastic lid.
Maybe someone would give me carrots and fruits
And spritz me with water twice a day.
The bird did come
The city kept one trail of grace:
a station. For too long I knew
it tossed trains out of town each day;
like birds, caught countryside and flew.
I brought myself ‘longside the tracks
many a time before, in dreams,
but here in person I did stand,
and nothing real is as it seems.
My toes were poised on concrete edge
and reaching out t’wards humming trail
on which I knew the bird was trav’ling,
coming for my own avail.
And two oblivions were mine.
They stood a moment’s breath apart.
One came before the bird would do,
one came before again t’would start.
While both would end the city’s grasp –
dead streets that wrapped around my feet –
I stood uncertain even still
and contemplated which to meet.
The tunnel echoed promises.
The bird did come without delay.
Upon a breath, a choice was made
and I stepped in and flew away.
To the stranger
The stranger whom I did not see
who passed not but a day ago
who carries no regard for me:
a stranger too. I cannot know
your will-not-be’s or could-be loves;
the days you’ve spoke or smoked or sang.
I cannot know your words thereof;
how long or if you’ve clenched in pain.
who knows you true, I cannot tell.
I cannot see your daily fears
(those which you wake just to foretell),
or if your mind is ever clear
enough to see yourself as real
as I myself shall never do.
I wonder if you’ll ever feel
a gladness that was fit for you.
The world’s alive with us, and though
I know the stranger’s always there
I do not stop to see them, so
I don’t become fully aware
of equal insignificance
inside us all. And what a thought
it is to vision consciousness
that follows every stranger. Caught
in our own troubled lives and minds
(as every stranger’s born to be)
we lose that everyone’s alive
beyond our own mind’s registry.
Dear stranger, though I do not know
the fragments of your mind and all
its methods, or what you do show
to other strangers when you fall
or if you’re going very far
or every sight you’re soon to see
or why your dreams are what they are
or why they will or will not be
–please take this short acknowledgement.
It is for you, to know you’re there
and for the stranger audient
who lives a person’s life somewhere.
The First Pill
Pill, I have seen every end
and every one will drop and bend
o’er the edge, into the rain
beats now upon my windowpane.
Pill, it comes not from all sides,
but from all cracks and all divides:
within, without or farther still.
It comes and comes and always will.
Pill, inside you may not keep
the final carrier to sleep;
the will, the strength to make things die
but that’s okay, for nor do I.
I am
Relieved to find that, in the face of the sky,
These eyelids still turn amber inside
And she whom I was meant to be
Exists in perpetual uncertainty
And dear old adorations survive
And sometimes still I am alive
Enough to abandon weary faces,
Enough to imagine groundless places.
Route 188
I saw today for what it wasn’t.
I saw a day that could not be.
I rode a bus that – going, going
– had no means of moving me.
Places passed the windows (clouded)
people too, and yet worlds more
or so I thought. My faulted eyes
soon saw they’d seen it all before.
And everyone was walking on,
heads down and just about to fall
and feet were grasping at the ground
but they weren’t moving. Not at all.
I knew that I was one of them
I knew, I knew, but even still
I left the bus at Place Unchanged
and watched it go. I always will.
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