Endings and Beginnings

Yes, I wonder what those big oak doors

are saying

I wonder if I could read something carved

into their polished lines

because I am down here searching for some

sense of believing

when God isn't sending me any dreams tonight

Safe place

February 12, 2007

The Hate List:

109.  How you made me feel like I’m difficult and crazy and no one else could ever put up with me.

The sound and the fury

and I am thundering through

this what must be

shattering the glass with the howling

wind of disappointment wrapped

around me

because this is a study in endings

of our ending duly recorded but

eroded by time

yes I am alone

that is my tree on the hill

my grey sky to raise my muted

expectations to…

Encroachment

December 23, 1991

Forgiveness infects a child slowly

as she watches her fantasy fall apart

as she watches reality explode into

slivers of melting ice.

Forgiveness comes slowly to her,

and she hates herself almost as much

as she hates you.

The trouble with memory

            Kitty, however, was coping with her own sense of rejection.  In her four and a half years at the University of Wisconsin, she hadn’t seen one sign of anyone from the Interior.  If she didn’t still have the bracelet, she might have convinced herself that she’d dreamt the whole thing up.  She had even started to wonder if the bracelet came from some rummage sale she’d been to with her mother, and that she’d spun a fantastic story around, in her need to feel special.  The more time that passed since her last visit, the less real the Interior seemed, and the less she remembered about it.

            Sometimes in her dreams she could hear the King talking to her but, of course, she never saw his face.  Nor could she recall what the apartment looked like that she’d stayed in during her convalescence.  The much-faded scar where the Minister’s knife had gone into her side failed to jog her memory.  Even when Kitty went to visit the Minister’s grave, she found no marker, presumably because no one had known who he was.  Its absence only heightened her sense of unreality.  Not for the first time did she wish Jack could remember his trip there, if only for someone to validate her experience.  But she seemed fated to just forget more and more about the Interior until, somehow, it would cease to exist in her memory at all.

Belief

Stretch me across your rack, my love

turn tight the wheels

I will not cry

I will not cry 

since of course I should have known

that the moment I found the 

heart to bring you here

I would be so much more alone

Irony

But the peace which comes my love

there is no lock on the door

And now you can shut out nothing

let alone the memory of

the war

Some kind of peace now

one hell of a peace now

All bruised and tattered and sore

as long as it hurts less than the no-peace

you were forever crashing through

before