The lost room

September 17, 1986

My happier self has returned!  Grey skies are gonna clear up, so put on a happy face...!  Excellent idea!  All I needed was a few hours of moodiness and an ice cream to get me back to my senses...after all, I’m the only person who can make me feel better.

I remember how something could

break every word you 

spoke

make you sound like 

you were

choking

The long shadow

Because I will miss you      when I am all alone

I will ask my questions       then wish you had come along

as I sit here with my head between my knees

my hand trailing listless in your wake              no real difference between a 

choice and a mistake

the stars led me everywhere but gone

if I could I would ask you please     I would shout it to your 

stones and rivers and trees

what were we doing here                   

how could we have been so wrong

What decorates the walls

She has a memory.  One beautiful memory.  Carefully held in the palm of her hands, so that no one else might find it and steal it.  She must leave it nowhere.  It must always remain with her.  The memory of that one summer morning, while they still slept.  The pavement of the driveway cool on her bare feet as she stepped into the shadow cast by the huge Mountain Ash in the front yard, the sun burning golden at the edges.  No one must have this moment.  This moment must never be touched.

Because she must hold it so close and so carefully, she cannot hold onto any others.  She lets the pictures framed in broken glass fall through her fingers.  There must only be one world.  One world, underneath the tree, where no one else exists.  Let the others sleep.  Let them all sleep.  She is a girl standing in the shadow of a golden halo.  She must never step out.  She must live here forever.

this voice         does not scream

these eyes        open only to dream

these lungs      too full of fire to breathe

The deep freeze

I am of the winter people, you see,

of a place where the snow causes

no sighs, no filaments of regret 

to pierce the skin as one

remembers warmth and

light.

Here winter is a relief,

a signal that what is

inevitable has come to

pass.

Disappointment

Kitty was coping with her own sense of rejection.  In her four and a half years at the University of Wisconsin, Kitty 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.

When you are a 

vanishing star

            a galaxy stuffed into

my little heart

In the cold

Where is                                  here I am        

gone home without you

when I would rocket from the world

out of an ocean so impossibly asleep                                     

is the rain your final call

because I am wondering what this was for

           

why you ever loved me

why you do not anymore

there is no witness here

only ghosts of words that nudged into breath

the shape of a fool      shivering and wet       

your blanket thrown over the bed one cold night too late

 my eyes, heavy with dreams 

but you—                  

very much awake

how I welcomed the chance to be wrong

to never ask why you had to leave

why you had to come at all

was it to drift away from this eroding shore

or was it

not wanting to be sorry

not wanting to be felt sorry for

one last secret for memory to keep

Now our half-truths ship out

under cover of a cloud-filled sky

the sun you once spoke of

never any friend of mine

                                   

can you feel it rain

can you?          

Wisdom, and the lack thereof

2013

Your heart has become their most deadly weapon.

I don’t know how.  Who in this world ever tells the truth?

before the knots of existence 
come undone
please 
just once

tell me I have done enough