THEY TELL ME I CHOSE THIS, BUT
When ministers are malignant narcissists
The church doors close gently
Trapping some inside, some out.
There is proof to me I am not right-minded
Only left-brained
With a certainty of being inside out, all seams poorly stitched
Tags showing content: 100% salt – sweat & tears.
Force is fashionable now: talk over anyone speaking!
Wave off impending doom with flickering annoyance!
Ignorance is for someone younger who thinks the Pow in Power
Is righteous when delivered to the face.
I fumble for my paper prayers – a handwrit’ life dodging AI algos…
In a landscape laced with sorrow, the horizon waits, limned in light
My God says “there, there, I see only what is love,”
“Put all this down: I have a new world to give you now!”

READY, AIM, FIRE
Never a gunsmith, just a weapons-master of words
Belief is all I’ve backpacked out of this wilderness.
Risen from the thorn-bed,
Tended by midwives
Packed away in cottonwool & fiberglass
One breath away from being Sent Back In
Finding life where I left it last…
Born behind the barricades of politics & war
I rise up, bloodied & unbowed.
I take my fight to the Masters of War
Hiding all of humanity behind me.
Every time.

THE JANUARY CALENDAR

The January birthdays are no more,

My sisters gone, my brother too, before his time.

My mother’s chores forever un-done

My dad a cipher in the family photos.

The aunts all dead, the uncles no longer slipping

This wide-eyed girl a dollar for ice cream.

I still know so little of Life

The circle becoming spiral

Down & down I go.

Mornings rekindle, afternoons fleet

The dark lasts forever

As I dream myself awake

In its deepest center,

Finally free of expectations,

Debt & doubt,

And calendars.

I walk alongside a running stream

Never still

Of one volition – continuous light.

I want to be the uncontainable force

Moved by Youniverse into the places I fit best

I want that me: she awaits

Of two minds about it all

Such is the fate of the Libra…

Handed off to Saturn return & the incoming

Tsunami of Love.

=====

Something shifts in my balance as I sleep

Mornings are early with “let’s get to it”

Married to “am I living this?”

=====

NOTE TO SELF

Don’t  you go living tomorrow today

And especially that tendency to drag up the past for another sniff!

Never give up the present for anything other than what it is

No matter how ….

           Oh! Something shiny!

=====

PRAY IN YOUR SPARE TIME

Not in the grave, tho grave it may be

Not to the deaf tho none really hear

Pray in the between of words

Said/unsaid

In the sore potential

Kinetic/active

======

QUINTESSENCE OF SILENCE

The clock stops ticking

The hum retreats

Whatever is believed in gets tidied up & put away

Light a few candles

Hum the holy hymns

While some dream, some drown

QUIETUDE OF SILENCE

Underwater

Where fish are still

I listen, hearing nothing

~ Listen harder

Stratospheric

Where clouds amass rain

I hear humming:

Rain by morning

My breath fits perfectly

Into my lungs.

The morning is a deal from the Gambler’s deck

A constant shuffling sound, the slap of cards to play.

I think back at the cat

Lounging on the corner of the bed

In her sloe-eyed silent blink

=====

Where has the when gone?

When I grow up

When I fall in love

Nightfall is a doorway of stars

The price of its freedom paid

With the fee of simply closing my eyes.

=====

Who knew even books would float off my little island of life

To other shores?

I pull my hands from storybook heroes

To fold them in my lap.

Simply staring down the night

Distilling into dreams

As antidote to the push n pull of living out loud.

In the logic of the impossible

I am it all:  beginning, middle, ending

Surrendered into breath.

=====

The mom & pop of selfing

Now unimportant.

I owe nothing, being no one

Anymore.

=====

Dreams brush up against me in a way other bodies never will

An intimacy unmatched with humans

Here is a language spoken that I understand

No matter its accent or words.

I coalesce into Carol on Friday night

Convinced all will change by tomorrow.

=====

A cat named Drift rides a horse named Moon

Through a night of satin & coal.

I’m known for my words, not the dreams of my sleep

Nor the rotund shape of my soul

All the nonsense of life

Washed up by tide to my door

Bringing light at its end:

From sacrum to sternum

A human once more.

Abandoned as an old religion,

The devil has my elbow, whispering innocences required

To enter heaven.

I move to the center of the wall I must climb over to exit

Escape is fluid & still evolutionary.

=======

DRUMS

Get UP! Get OUT!

The drums are starting again

All illusions of freedom become illusory

When anthems fill the air

When men choose their spears

Over women who want to dance.

The affronted ancestors rise up, chanting

Eerie voices staccato for conquest,

Plucking at the carts we

Break our backs to pull, babies tucked along the sides,

Rise UP! Get you gone

There is no remedy here for the wars

Brewing in the forests,

Stick to the paths, avoid the demons

Plucking at possessions.

Only one narrow corridor of escape

From the village, already flaming behind.

=======

Regrets rise like bubbles in a glass of tears.

I had enough of you before,

Let alone you invade me now

Begone from my beaten breast

In breaths expelled with sounds of tearing!

=======

I no longer believe the sacred, I do not look

For God anymore, or mothers, or husbands.

All the aggrieved virgin saints in ragged, raped glory

Flank me now, escort me

Since erasing sin

Is worthwhile for the holy.

=======

Being done with liars

I purvey the truth

While stuffing aces up my sleeves…

In a world victimized, weaponized,

I cannot choose the window or the door

I freeze between the kitchen & the bed

While darkness dims the lights of any yes.

It slides across a no like water across a road

Drowning out any maybe –

And cognitive dissonance reigns like truth

Rescheduled for a better time.

=======

You have become a contagious denial

Front & center, a denial in a matter of thinking

Shivering before me now

No longer golden, nor free, but

A bitter gourd of regret. A lost soul turning, turning.

I cannot scrape you off of me, no fingernails gain hold,

The black remains:

Your future marked with bloody handprints

The rivals of a 12-year-old’s heart in biting, feckless lies.

=======

Hail the Grail of my guilt

Shared unevenly

This life will suit no more

I don old shoes

And take to the roads

To meet a pilgrimage of ghosts.

=======

The angels themselves

Put feathers in my pockets

Wrapping me in wings of rosemary remembrance.

They stroke my wrists & kiss my forehead

Passing through my heart now clean,

Rise up, O wondrous one, believe in no one

But yourself, the all of Creation

The One they speak of in whispers

Pointing long fingers away from the paths

Over fields of grandeur

Under clouds of glory,

Move away from the serially unholy

Choosing one above the other

And burying the rest.

A YEAR HAS GONE BY

I have given it away

Day by day, doing for self & others

Defining my life by many standards

Discovering myself in words & wishes

Living on music & cheese

& too much sugar

& not enough greens.

A  year of lists & surface planning

Having run plumb out of “life goals”

Comfortable in the Wait Room

Watching the door.

I did not learn Russian

Or take apart a motorboat engine.

I reorganized my bookcase ten thousand times

And finally emptied the nagging under-bed box into the Goodwill bin,

Surrendering old wires & a handheld calculator

Resurrecting tablets & AAA journey maps of the US of A.

A year of letting Life happen, not taking

Real charge in any meaningful way

Of small satisfactions & rearrangements & digging thru the present

As tho it is my past

Which was layered & complex & textured & vivid with days

I paid attention to.

That Great American Novel served piecemeal in blog entries

Perhaps read by others.

I tried theatre & volunteering & these held magic awhile.

I picked things up & put them down someplace else.

I did life in small bites, chewing thoughtfully.

A year of unnoticeable difference

Exploring, aging, serving in small ways

To discover what no longer served me.

There’s coming a time for More Than This

This what-I-have, not what-I-had, nor what-I-will.

Now comes the present of the Future

Finding the more in refining structures & redefining desires

I have every hope of arrival

Once I select a Destination.

Christmas Eve 2025

If I could sing, my voice would have a bluegrass hiccup on the high notes

If I were slim, I would never wear a bra.

If I were young, I would choose again when it came to being old.
———————

After beginnings, I sometimes falter

Perhaps that’s how I got here.

———————

I write poems on the backs of my diet menus

In careless disregard … as I munch chocolate mint cookies in bed.

I have decided to live as if I decided to be the way I am,

Notwithstanding suggestions surrounding choices.

To be happy is to be healthy enough.

———————-

Living my way is only fair

My wings are an inside job, my life is littered with feathers

And comfortable shoes for my friends to deride.

I burn incense under fire alarms with a stick nearby to poke the screech.

————————

HILLSBORO

In Betty’s yard, yellow flowers grow on the tips of leafy stems.

There’s an unfinished fence to contain these, & dirt-clumped ground

To probe bare feet.

A frayed clothesline holds wood-sprung clips

In turn, holding nothing at all.

An unconscious solidarity, my face becomes

A clock, following their petals east to west

The sky only a feeling on rainy days.

My head grows heavy, filling with seeds

Once fallen, I will feed the world,

Calling birds to the runes of tree roots gnarling the boundaries.

Of Betty’s  yard.

————————-

The ocean is always nearer than a thought of tides,

Turning on its edges to re-enter itself,

Ridged, wrinkled, silken, gray-white with pickling salt.

———————-

I want to live in a lighthouse

Lining the circular walls with books

I can drift my fingers upon, pulling one to read

On my journey towards the Light,

While at the base, the sea slithers & hovers & booms

Hissing among the rocks, scribing on sand.

————————–

I hear a drum

Or is it fireworks at midnight?

Faraway-faint.

I flick the blinds to see

Raccoons loping by in doglike packs

Masked with the aplomb of true bandits

Did they plant the explosives?

——————–

Florida has much to say if you speak Jungle

Huge Adam & Eve leaves quiver on trees

Atop roots of black mold grimy as sin.

So green, so wild, a lunch of little flavor if you favor a sky

Munching mountains, that sierra symphony.

Florida has alligators & anhingas swimming

The same waters

Blue herons stalk while

Pelicans dive among floater-boat gulls

———————–

(Too bad I cannot eat my words

Ideas like Italian ices, cooled & lemony

Sweet & sudden on the tongue,

Freezing the brain.)

I’m a writer, I tell you

Just tamped & tamed by earning since

I cannot devour syllables.

I prize them loose & pack them down in soil

Where they breathe into roots & water,

Like bread that rises with morning to nourish.

Some words yellow as butter or smelly cheese,

Tart as root vegetables, soft like ripe tomatoes

A salad is a poem

Leafy & crunch-spined

A lean diet crafted in layers

Gilded in dressing, evasive to gather, hard to chew

Seeded & spiced to flavor with adverbs & minute spicy grains

Sparkled & healthy & cleaning to the system.

Buon Appetit!

There remain unedited spaces in my soul

Where I have not scratched out words & written others in,

Spaces where erasures don’t occur & bold lettering of

Initial thought stand like trees in a forest –

Some broken off halfway & left in splintered hope

Some hyphens with no matches in balance

(the dashes where anything can yet be brought to play.)

There are whole nurseries of thought seeded in good soil

Awaiting the nourishment of attention, the light of consciousness

To life the greening leaves & show the shoots.

I’ll get there, if not now, then When.

Beginnings are rugged. From where I sit, so many seem

Truncated by circumstance & limitation.

With the advent of the future’s imminent arrival,

I wonder about setting off with good shoes on an

Untrodden path.

I sit on the edge of the bed, tying them on,

Adjusting the tongue,s couching the heels, breathing

Through more beginnings.

I keep thinking I’m at the end of the roads

So many rolled up to this place

I walked them all in my mind if not in real space.

Good thing thoughts are good as deeds!

The locus of my discontent is blurred over

By satisfactions well-achieved & homespun,

Sometimes homely, somewhat overlong in arriving.

I have stopped shrinking, telling others I am instead

Condensing.

Potentials gone awry

I could call my biography,

“The Road Never Traveled”,

The Gospel of Carol, rounded

Upon itself, stuffed into a clay jar

Out in a desert cave

Of some interplanetary space.

Such dreams I have had, such adventures,

Such scenery I have seen, such white waters skimmed

On a slippery raft where I clutched

The edges with broken nails &

A grin, one eye closed to face that

Future rushing up & around –

I have blasted & blurred through

My life & savored & slept its reality

Wholehearted.

It’s been one epic poem that has not ended,

This time on Earth – one Norse saga after a

Shakespearean couplet pretense at closure

(but more commentary.)

The words I cast nets into the starred universe for

My Milky Way of rhyme, meter, song & story

Always aglow out there in the where.

So many tools I did not pick up to learn their function

So many clouds I did not call a shape to

So many stars unseen, but burning in their planetary way…

I am an old woman now, at a campfire once blazing,

Now a steady warming ring, keeping company,

Distorting light into what I wish to see.

Though diurnal, my senses blur with coming daylight,

Quiver into the energy of a society where I earn my way.

It is at the 4 a.m. hour where my whiskers twitch awake

The words come like some rogue wave

Washing away the ordinary, flooding the town

Where I learned to build my world on stilts

Or be flooded off in splinters.

I blink, therefore I am.

The world of my perception changes with each

Open/close of these tired eyes.

Just when I think the  horizon on approach

A bell rings – like the old typewriter margin bells –

The lines shift & withdraw as I cast the words

To draw it back again, one tug after another

While towing all else behind.

I’m drawing back the curtain

to see what lives behind

I’m sorting thru the webbies

from the spiders in my mind

I’m seeing new beginnings

in what-all I’ve left behind

I’m stronger for the memory

in the minders to re-mind.

All the monsters roam the hallways

None now linger under-bed

and the closet door is open

and there’s room inside my head

where the light has gone to linger

I’ll believe what’s up ahead

only when I see it dead.

I have given up decisions

which I thought I’d never do

I have answered all the questions

So all that’s left is New

i have fashioned me a headdress

of old feathers, ragged, blue

I could write my way forever

Given time & space & who

I have opened in the middle

my discov’ry is complete

there’s no room for ever-after

my invasion is replete.

I could walk away without me

scattered breadcrumbs in the street.