Food is Love

Always eager to make things better
& more
I would walk downstairs
at night
when my mother couldn’t sleep
sitting in her lap
clad in pale yellow
flannel pajamas
with white rick rick trim
I would trace
where the tears
had dried on her face
with stubby fingers
that smelled of baby powder.
She would get up
and fix me
a plate of buttered saltines.
One in the middle
four framing the edge
of the blue ceramic plate.
I don’t know why she didn’t
offer me a traditional
glade of warm milk,
I only knew that
when I had eaten
the five crackers
topped with a thin
layer of butter,

(love letters down my gullet)

she would carry me up to my bed
and I could
fall asleep again.

***

Today, my boss had so many meetings
back to back
she didn’t have time for
a lunch break.

“Do you want me to pick something up for you?”
I offered.

“Well, where are you going?”

“Anywhere, I can go anywhere.”

“I kind of want those dried wasabi peas
and some dark chocolate.”

I nod.
“I’ll go to Uwajimaya.”

Smelling the exhaust of several busses,
I am yet again on another mission
to make it better,
leopard print crocs
pounding the pavement
& countless crosswalks.
The bags of wasabi peas
are all in Japanese,
I can’t tell which is
the right one.
I take a guess,
adding it to the
bar of dark chocolate,
small plastic box of such
and single white nectarine
already in my arms.

Food is love.

I take the same route back on foot,
beaming.
This is making it better,
this is my purpose for the afternoon.
She smiles and nods,
mouthing “thank you”
as I tiptoe into her office
gingerly, placing wasabi peas,
dark chocolate and some change
on her desk, like bringing
and offering to an altar.

I go back to my desk
& do several useful tasks
that I’m supposed to,
but bringing her what she craved
is the favorite
and most important thing
I’ve done today.

Type P

I knew he was not for me
when he suggested
I sell my poems.

“They’re good,”
he said
“People will buy them.”

(If you’re writing poems
so people will buy them,
you’re missing
the point entirely.)

I write poems because
I can’t not write poems–
I cut myself and lyric
language and observations
about the world as I know
it pour out onto the
page, drop by drop.

And it’s potent stuff.

Sometimes it spurts onto
the page in bright red
drops: sometimes it flow
in parallel
rivulets: sometimes it’s a
deluge, like a dam has
broken: the poems
cascade onto the page,
soaking my notebook until
it’s floating in a crimson
pool and I’m afraid I’ve
cut too deep.

I don’t write poems
so people will buy them.
It’s literary blood-letting.
Singularly mine &
not to be monetized.

Untitled #1

Hesitation sits hunched over in the corner
carefully alternating between licking his gums
and flossing his teeth. his meticulous nature
compels him to extricate every instance of plaque
but he doesn’t have the gumption to cut the white
strand from it’s waxen wheel, so he just goes through
floss like a typewriter goes through ribbon.

when there is no more clean floss left,
he regards the pile of plaque and wax
and saliva as if it will give him some answer.
or forgive him.

for not having the courage that is needed
to finally make a
Decision.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Makes My Heart Stop A Wee Bit…

Sowing and Reaping

When Love comes, it will not be a labyrinth.
There will be no impenetrable walls,
no winding paths to nowhere,
no striving, no goal that you are eager to achieve
or place that you think you need to be.

When Love comes, it will be a key
that opens a sturdy wooden garden gate.
In that garden, you’ll do the work.
Build the raised beds, pour in the soil,
curate the seeds, plant them, water and wait.

Love is not a meandering artery
with a beginning, middle and end.
Love is growth and the seasons,
if you’re lucky.

I ask you to be patient
and wait for that key.
And just when you have given up
all hope of it ever appearing,
a magpie will drop it in your lap
and fly away, cackling.

Her Venture

Getting to know him wasn’t like peeling back an onion.
Getting to know him was like chipping ice off a
frozen windshield with a credit card
in Minnesotan sub-zero temperatures
with no gloves and a broken defroster.

Getting to know him was simultaneously
delightful and exasperating.
An enigmatic archeology expedition
that she did not yet wish to terminate.

Or an extended military action
sustained only by covert operations.
With the right armor, she thought,
she could brave any resistance
or rejection. She would tear
down that damn wall he had built
around himself rock by rock…

 
But was it worth it?

 

 

(Perhaps they were both too damaged
for anything to happen.)