I went out tonight....

I met a friend for dinner and a drink or two.
to open our hearts and be together
instead of alone
for a little while.
Because together is just better.

When she left I stayed
and listened to poetry
for the first time in perhaps
18 years
I wanted to be a part of
the place in my heart that
writes and shares and pretends
it knows how to rhyme--
(even though poems aren't defined
by
rhyme)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The World
Keeping warm

"I was asked to ... do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it. "
Audrey Hepburn

Strength seems like
insulation
layers
that change you
to some degree
not totally- like the bumper sticker:
I may be fat, but you're ugly
and at least I can lose weight"

I'm me- I just so damn
different!
Hidden inside layers, gray hairs...
My voice is

the same
but it's my turn
to watch the moves, not make them
or be moved on.

How can I already be
almost 40?
How can I only be~

Even without words
the sound of
poems spokensung
is comforting on a paper too small.
It should be a notebook, regardless
this is
a part of home almost forgotten
the poet on the pulpit

A part of me
has been sleeping
He is tapping to wake her
But the landscape
is different~
Should I be...am I....which is me?

I want to be
but I can't seem to care. I just know
who I am
how I am

I'm part of this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's not about lips
fingertips
It is about being alone
becoming
something
new

Are you a reader?
It's a part of my soul.
The inward faced photograph
silenced
without a pen
sentenced.
Homeless.
Never, actually, alone
residing with all sides of me

It's about decision.

Each moment.

What can you carry?
What carries you through?

I'm reaching
casting
fly fishing poles
in running rivers

with what feels like
the wrong bait.

Regardless of the Ingredients

How much of who you are
is who you decide     to be
and how much
the one that pushes through?
How much the one that
carries you?
I can't tell.

From the outside
do I still seem
too young to understand?
Cuz from in here
it seems I wrote
the answer key.

The point of being at the bar
was never who was beside me.
But that it was me
defining me.
So
I suppose
it turns out to be
my own recipe.

The numbers

**Please note- this is a poem and it does reference some adult content**

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.  ~Japanese Proverb

It’s like I didn’t realize

I had a backpack on. If I had

I might have wanted to take it off

Or hide it.

I don’t want my skeletons in a closet, though.

I think I’d rather wear them

Display them, like hunting trophies mounted

On my memory wall

But…covering myself in my past demons?

Dancing in the rain made of

Tears of shame

                       And fallacy?

Each moment, even the losses, perhaps especially those

Have become victories

Strength.  Because I’m still here.

*The 16 year old

standing in the screaming slut-words

Flying from my mother’s mouth

I lived that slander till it fit, embraced it

With many men, too many.

But

On the flip side

                Is me now. Faithful, strong wife to an athlete and coach

                With cancer

                Mother of three

                Independent power goddess

                Growing

                Giving

*The 19 year old

laying too drunk

Beneath The Unwanted

Conscious enough to check for a condom

But not enough to pull away

Or standing scared in a dark dorm room

While the body building underclassman

Begs for a blow job

With a threat balancing on his biceps

Or crawling crying to the motel bathroom

Dripping from the hot tub

Hiding from the 2 guys who tricked me

And took me

I tried to join in with vigor

And ended up bawling, begging to go home.

But

On the flip side

                Is me now, 38 year old warrior

                Going out dancing with the girls

                Only a wing man

                Stumbling happily home

                To my always sober sweetheart

                Who doesn’t dance and loves me

*The 22 year old living alone with 2 cats

In a cabin in Maine only mildly different

From Thoreau

Student, teacher, volunteer, one family’s personal Mary Poppins~

Graduating that with not

Just a 4.0 degree

Most Honored Student Award

And highest graduating senior in my department.

But with the confidence that comes

From succeeding through giving.

Loving for years my own personal

Genius, reaching him, touching him,

Till beneath him, a whore

He was finally taking me, yet refusing to kiss me. 3 years

Of longing and finally finding it

Lacking the luster of any dream. An old record, skipping and scratched

These moments of me

These moments in time, some say they

Choose to change nothing

For each battle, won or lost,

Is a moment in training

For the war we are winning

Simply by living.

It’s more, though, for me.

I am here now, 38 year old

Mother of 3, 7 years a wife to a man

With a deep dent in his head

Scars from his war with brain cells

Gone rogue.

Cancer.

Incurable.

“Isn’t that enough?”

Since you are strong enough, no.

Teacher of 12 years

Finding faith

                Strength and hope

Standing at the head of the class, coaching

Modeling

Understanding

I have seen how much more kids learn

From our actions

So I act out the best of me

                For them

And in acting

Become

In becoming, building strength

So the classroom is taken

Leaving me wandering halls

A ghost in a shell

Till I realize

Whether I want it or not

That backpack is on me

These numbers all make me

So…

Empty the closet

Put up my trophies, my past Me’s,

Embrace them

                                                The scared

                                          Lonely

                                    Raped

                                Lost

                     Betrayed

                Abused

      Confused

And alone

Each one gives me power-

The strength and protection

Of armor and weapons

It’s not that I wouldn’t change

What I’ve been through, I couldn’t.

Rather I choose to remember

For facing this battle with brain cells

Grade IV, 52 week median life span

More numbers

This battle with cancer

And cohorts, desperation and destitution

Without my armor, my shield, and my weapons

I’d lose

This time I’m gaining the strength that comes

From learning to ask for help

Repeatedly

The strength of flexible tenderness that comes

From knowing how it feels

To be the one that needs

To ask for help.  And hold my head high.

No closets or trophies or backpacks

You can’t ignore numbers

But it’s too much

To wear on my sleeve

No. Instead, let me drape myself

In cloaks of my skeletons

Gowns made glittery

With the tears of past shame, loss, fear

Adorn me in jewels unbreakable

Forged in the fires

I’ve survived.

And let me always remember

To use the numbers to count the time, feel the rhythm.

I love to dance.

Faerie tales

Once upon a time…I like faerie stories.  Tales of things fantastic.  But when it seems my life is swirling through the twilight zone, what then? I looked at the sky today and the clouds were moving.  There were two layers, and the closer ones were sliding along on a different track. It was surreal, for some reason.  I knew a long time ago that there were no happy endings.  Things don’t end like that…they keep going and when they go, they tends to be messy.  If they do end in that perfect spot, it tends to be Romeo and Juliet style, with lies and death, deception and loss.  Of course, those fit into any story, because real life is messy.  I forgot, though, until tonight.  I forgot a lesson I learned a long time ago…you are your only best friend.  When everything is said and done, there will be no one at your side, but you.  In Dan Millman’s book, he talks about how your body is the only thing you will always have.  That is profound, but I think my realization is more important.  I wonder why I seek the release of too much alcohol…I don’t want to be run by it.  My mother was broken by it.  Her father was a demon made flesh by it, beating the woman he loved, sending his children to hide under a table in hopes he would over look them. I’d like to dream.  To hope and imagine…but I don’t know how.  I keep trying but it just makes me feel selfish and bad.  I know what it is. I had something in me that is smaller now.  I feel life killing that part of me that used to shine…I had something.  Something special, energetic, bizarre and happy to be that way, Grabbing at everything that felt good and fun and strong and bright.  Laughing that way.  I don’t know where that part of me has gone.  I tend to think I deserve only the worst.  That comes from the women who raised me…There are people who barely know me that want to help and I don’t know what to do with that.  I don’t want to need help.  I feel awful when I use that help to buy vitamins that I hope help my joints hurt less and a bottle of wine to help my heart hurt less.  Who am I?  And why the hell don’t’ I know the answer to that at 38 years old??  John loves me so well, I didn’t realize that I had been forgetting how to be alone…how to be the part of me that I forced myself to get to know.  I left everyone that loved me and lived alone, in the woods.  I learned to find support and joy in myself, since I knew for sure I was the only one that would be there forever.  I really thought John would be there too.  When I think that that isn’t true, my world spins.  The thing that makes it suck extra??  He would be, if he could be…but the world had to throw one of the most deadly cancers at him to take him away…I know that is self centered.  I don’t know what to do with that thought, though…if he lives 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, its less than I thought, and I’m left alone.  I hoped I’d never be alone again.  Of course, there is my kids.  So I guess I won’t be alone.  I love them so much it touches parts of me that  you can’t see.  And I am so scared I will screw them up, it tears my heart in ways I can’t put into words.  There is not right and wrong as far as I can see… there is only the best you can do, and heaven help you to be strong enough to make that something good.

dressing room

Find an image, try it on.  woman scorned? Running away from the terror at home? New age business woman? Why am I 38 trying on personas?  My husband has cancer.  I can’t explain that so well. I can explain the disease he has.  I can explain the operations he has had; the dangerous fluid build up that followed the second tumor removal- what likely caused it, why they were so afraid, what he had to do to heal.  I can explain several different treatments, what happens post radiation, and what might happen with the poison he has to take to kill the cancer, otherwise known as the chemotherapy.  I can even describe the staples in his head.  I don’t know what it feels like to have staples in your head, though.  And try as I might, I don’t think I could describe what it is to realize that for the foreseeable future, we will have to face his mortality every two months.  And every month, when he takes that poison, too. I can’t explain why, when it hits him hard, I move through mud, can barely wind my own gears. It’s like there is a physical chord that connects us, not just the binds of marriage and love.  The house gets three steps beyond messy, deep into slob land.  Therapists tell me I am dealing with superhuman type issues.  Not living your normal life.  I guess I always knew that wasn’t in the cards for me.  But why does “not your normal life” have to be one of the hardest hands that one can be dealt?

Able at the least

Strong, weak, pathetic, capable, able at least…

John has to go into the machine alone.  The black and white smoky images that come back are not of my brain, they do not predict my future.  Not directly anyway.

What does he feel while he lies there?  What does he think of?  Does he walk through dives, recall adventures with his old friends?  Does he dream of me, of the times he touched me deeply, body and soul? Do the faces of our three little ones dance behind his eyes…

I don’t always know how to comfort him.  I’m not sure I ever really will.  Not sure how often, exactly, it is my job.  He needs to be treated normally, as often as possible…right?  It is a game.  I hate games.  It is a game I can’t help but play….something else…we are never going to be normal.  What is that?  I used to joke…it isn’t a joke anymore

.

Life throws a pile of shit at each of us. Sometimes in one huge clump.  Sometimes in a bunch of smaller ones.  I read of a monk, walking barefoot to beg for his food.  When asked how it was, he said it hurt, walking on bare feet like that.  The response was to focus on the foot in the air and how relieved and free of pain it was.  It is all about focus.

I understand that.  But sometimes, I don’t know how to find the strength.  Seriously.  So stupid, that it takes so much strength to focus on the raised foot.  I see the gratitude, the reasons for it.  Three times they cut into his brain, three!  And he is still himself. 

Justice is a concept that, now, seems even more undefinable.  What if it is stronger than me, the fear?  And I think, there is no real justice.  There may be some sort of balance, now and then…but it seems for the most part to be accidental.  The power lies within.  For each of us, regardless of the script we face, the power doesn’t seem to be in karma, god, or fate.  It lies within us, for each of us has the strength, if tapped and supported the right way, to move mountains.  We are able to find hope in devastation, faith inside chaos.

Family is what ties, whether or not there is blood to define it.  Hold close those that mean something to you.  Believe that within you lies the strength to get through seeing good in all the breaks around you, for everything breaks.