Saturday, September 17, 2011

Fragments


I dug a grave and finally gave our past the rest
that it had craved and I took
the ashes of our passion and dissolved them in a tidal wave and I
swept up the dust of our former lust and mopped up the mess
that we had made but
there's still a shard, I think, of what
we tried so hard to save and when I walk
I can feel fragments crunch beneath my heels, remnants
of what once was good and should
have lasted but
just couldn't.

Staying up

One summer night I stayed up wishing.
One April night I cried.
One day in May I chose to pray,
And one winter night,
I lied.

One day I saw you walk away,
and I lay in bed and watched. I thought that if I
stayed and slept,
I could forget that you had left.
I wanted you to turn and sigh--to wait for me to say goodbye but
you didn't wait.
You took what we had crafted and you trashed it without
upset or regret or worry that the threads would
reach out and connect
you to me.  

So one summer night I stayed up wishing
that I'd stopped you.
One April night I cried.
One day in May I chose to pray
for everything I didn't say.
And one winter night
I lied and made
myself believe that
you had stayed.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Wall

The pavement's cold and it's raining
It's a storm.
There's paint peeling off the walls and the ceiling
Layers of acrylic, yielding
Conceding after concealing, year after year
All the stains and the smears,
The badly done veneer
The lines of graffiti that keep repeating
The cracks in the concrete that keep receding
every summer but come grinning back in the winter months
Taunting and leering,
asking for that one coat of paint that would
eliminate the taint
of a poor man's inability
to fix his living space.
There's a lady in the house, and a baby.
The baby's catatonic and the lady
alcoholic
and
The poor man works through the nights and the mornings
just to eat.
"I'm home, honey," he says, full well knowing
That his wife's passed out by the couch.
No one greets him when he calls, no one answers but the walls.
Look! There's the spot that the coffee stained when the saucer went flying
And the crack where the clay mug shattered
And oh! That was where the month's money went,
Into the dents in the doors and cement
And there's the scar at the heart
of the art
that he bought for his dear
at the start of their marriage career
But
All she'd wanted was a beer.
So wouldn't it be queer
To erase
all the memories that his place
Had collected through the days
Like pieces meant to grace
the empty space that became
a collage of his fate?
After all, the only answer that he got when he called
Was from the peeling paint on the wall.