Well Enough Alone

What if everything really is perfect?
What if my little ideas
about what should or should not be
are the only problem?

For all our rants about right and wrong
the closest I've ever experienced anyone move
toward genuine love for a stranger
was in the face of complete disaster.

911 shook New York to it's core,
and rippled across the world...
dropping me to my knees in the process,
filling me full of all I ever feared I was...
Then wrapping me in all I ever hoped I was.
The hatred and the love

In those moments, and for days afterward
we were one people....our hearts broken open,
united in a kind of humanity
born of tragedy.
Seeing the truth of ourselves as we couldn't otherwise have seen.

What if evil is the hide and seek game we play with ourselves
in this illusion we call reality?

A Well Seasoned Life

Spring slipped into my dream last night
young, innocent and alive
it played with the strings of my heart
then gently drifted into summer's longing,
sticky hot, and filled with passion.

I held it in that place between sleep and dawn
for quite some time,
only to awaken in a bed of autumn,
Winters chill just beyond the window.

Out Of The Woods

We are not,
wandering together,
lost in a dark, dense wood.

We are,
each of us,
the dark, dense wood
in which we are lost.

The sooner we stop listening to
those calling from the edge
of their perceived freedom,
the sooner we will discover
our own.

It is an inner path....solitary
but with common perspectives
that fool many into believing
it is a shared journey.

Unfortunately, knowing this doesn't mean
I am out of the woods yet....
but remembering it keeps me from
calling to you from the edges.

Black Sheeps Wool

Regret is a garment
tailored to perfection
with shame based threads
and martyred seams.

Better a coat of Black Sheep's wool
shorn from choices foolishly brave
in the face of tsk-tsk tongues and wagging heads
than an imposters parade.

At the end of life you will find yourself
waiting with open arms. 

The Lost Girl Poems

On the top shelf,
in the back of my closet,
there is an old box.
Inside, hand scrawled notebooks
and typewritten verses bear witness...
to innocence lost and love gone blind.

These are the lost girl poems;
my youth spilled across pages
yellowed from age.
And while they're not very good
it doesn't matter, because I truly was.....
Good and faithful...
filled with a kind of hope
that naive girls spend on reckless men
....until we see our riches tossed aside like loose change.

And even then....some of us stay a while longer.
Addicted to the combination of alcohol and testosterone, I imagine.
Beautiful bad boys, lost inside what appears to be full grown men.
Or maybe it's the inherent ability to see a pain so deep
we will forgive them anything.
I don't know.
I learned lots of theories about why women stay
.....after I'd gone.

In the end it was my poems that saved me.
And maybe that's why I keep them....
memory lane memorials to my survival.
It's hard to lie to yourself in black and white.
The good and the bad line up perfectly,
one eventually outweighing the other.

So my children, if you dig that box out after I am gone
don't believe a single word....
believe all of them.
See them through the eyes of youth
and the heart of hope.
Compare them to your own experiences
and maybe you'll find me there.....I did.
Before that I was as lost as anyone you'll ever know.

And maybe that's why these scraps of paper and tear stained lines
have been included with every move I've made
in the nearly thirty years since they were written.
They are a testament to how absolutely lost one can be
before the finding finally fells them.

They are like old diaries, for me.
Road maps to here,
and a passage back to the beginning.
I am neither proud of them or ashamed.
They are an honest account...
travel journals from an inner journey.

At the end of my life feel free to gather them up with these...
the tidy books of my later years,
and set them all ablaze....
my cremation complete.

Or keep them and share them with your babies someday.
Tell them this is what they come from....
hearty, reckless stock that gave love everything they had....
and  then gave Truth more.
People more invested in how they felt on the inside
than how they looked on the outside.

Anyway, they are there,
in an old box on the top shelf
in the back of my closet.
When I am gone I really don't mind you throwing them out.
For me to do it would be nothing less than sacrilege.

Threads Bared

Clothe me in all my missteps,
wrap me in the bright rags of youths poor choices
and guilty pleasures....
headstrong rebellion and absolute faith.

An outgrown wardrobe of stubborn idealism
and reckless abandon hangs honestly
in the back of my closet...
the skeletons long gone.

Sew for me a patchwork quilt 
of love lost and dreams shattered.
Adorn it with broken promises,
eagerly believed and stubbornly held
far too long.

I will wrap it proudly around me

and pass it along to my children
so they can know the cloth from which they were cut.
That they come by it honestly, this need to live out loud
and learn from their own lessons.

In the end they will remember
the humble warp and grateful weft
woven into the fabric of my later years.
They will tug at threads spun of inner wisdom
shorn from the defiance of black sheep wool
and the willingness to know oneself deeply...honestly.
 
And with these threads they will sew for themselves
garments of their own choosing.