beliefs

Borrowing

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my new favorite band
sings just to me
when you have pain or debt
who do you borrow from?

i think of Dunbar again
(just one riotous day)
and the root, of course,
in my love affair with words.

debt: Latin (debere), to owe
how ironic, rhymes with borrow
and i wonder if the Avetts, whose
name sounds like the Latin avis (bird)

are asking me (they sing to me)
if i borrow pain (can we borrow suffering?)
or if debt is a form of pain
or if it is life we borrow.

i will never know.
i am just a listener of songs
like all the other listeners,
borrowing their music to bury my pain.

Troop Leader

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it may have taken two years
of counting and miscounting
of piling up paperwork
and learning to manage
twenty five-then-six-now-seven-year-olds,
of arguing parents
and camping trip disasters
and never forgetting how to forget,
but here i am,
Girl Scout troop leader,
just for a moment feeling like
I’ve got this down,
I can do this,
I can count and organize,
I can be just what I need to be
in the eyes of
my daughters
their daughters
the daughters of the world
(or world, the one we want to give them).

Mole

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you are a cancerous mole
on otherwise flawless skin
appearing from nowhere
but settling in with a vicious sting
as if you have always belonged.

perhaps you have been there
hiding beneath scabs and
thin strands of golden hair,
waiting in the depths of tissue
to release your venom.

now you haunt my fingers
as they try to dance across
the once-smooth place you’ve
chosen to poison. but i know
that you won’t be here long.

i swallow the thought of your release
with these pills of gratitude
that i have purchased without you knowing.
you may have sneaked into my life,
but your exit will be quick and painless.

War Paint

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it started with innocence
plastered on little girls’ faces
like war paint,
pink, blue, ready for battle.

after a long drive,
a stop at the store,
and a mile up the mountain,
after sifting through
golden remnants of fall
and finding treasures
in sticks, under rocks,
the war paint began to smear.

dripping down into the vessels
of their wrinkle-less cheeks,
the pink, the blue, the blood
awakened them to a new reality.

(i want to take my brush,
soft as silk on their skin,
dip it back into the bucket
and paint them, my young,
until they are blinded from
the horrors of everyday war)

but it is too late. for it
dripped and seeped and slithered
into their eyesmouthporeshearts
as they sat awestruck in
the back seat my (motherly) hands
pushed them into.

as their lips wrapped themselves
around their Sausalito saltwater taffy
(blue and pink, like war paint,
a gift brought home, home)
they took in the scene, faces
in the window, knees on the seat,
all innocence wiped away.

shattered glass. hushed crowd.
distant (gapingly absent) sirens.
blue and red blinking lights.
knees on the pavement.
blood on the pavement.
bodies on the pavement.

it ended with…
a long drive,
a stop at the store,
and sticky faces and hands,
war paint, pink, blue,
faded from their first battle.

Hands

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you come into my mind
as i wonder about the state of our world
as i worry on empty stones
as i beseech the heavens for answers

there you are, pop!
with your generous, gentle hands,
your offerings like gold
in the hands of the needy,
your love as pure and smooth
as a newborn’s hands,
and i remember.

i remember that
what it will take are
the hands of people like you
to shape the world into
the place we want our children
to call their own.

Cotton

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Try stuffing cotton in,
then maybe you could hear me better,
because even when I SHOUT!
you turn away and talk.

I have a bag right here,
fresh from the store,
shorn from the greatest
polyester plant in China.

Perhaps if I sent you there,
where students must stand
at silent attention when the
teacher enters the room,

and crowd into one hundred
lecture-style desks lined up
like building blocks in their
echoed cave, you would listen.

But for now, let me take a
piece of polyester-cotton ball,
one for each ear, so at the very least,
I won’t have to listen to you.

Suffering

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how it seeps into our lives
like acid rain in the gutter of our world
and though we scrub our skin
and mop the stained pavement,
it returns, dark and thick, unblockable.

how it creeps into our lives
with chirps and whistles, childlike,
hidden between the pages of our books,
behind the minor notes of major music,
its words and melodies compiled
into a cacophonous calamity of sadness.

how it breathes its life into our lives,
slithering snakelike into the brightest moments,
reminding us of who we could be,
of what within us we have lost,
of who we are in this moment, this
undefinable, sorrowful,
searching-for-meaning moment of suffering.

Birthday Party

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it is her first invite
(i wish it was her last)
and we sit in awkward silence
exchanging knowing looks

we’re surrounded by excess fat
skimmed off meat
once set aside just for the rich that has
oozed into our barely-middle class neighborhood

in gluttonous globs it surrounds
even the youngest rosy cheeks,
tripping and slipping their every step
as they unwrap, unwrap, unravel.

by coming here today, we are guilty,
and though our portion size is smaller,
it sits at the edge of the heaped-to-ceiling plate,
torn to bits in minutes by a ferocious four-year-old.

we take our leftovers in six baggies home,
but they are not for the dog. they are for us,
our girls, to chew on all evening, to try and
fill the growling hole in our gut-wrenched stomachs.

Wild Waves

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in wild waves they come
splashing me with sticky, salty skin,
throwing me into the undercurrents
of what they think is right.

i stand on the shore facing their storm,
waiting for the moon to send the tide back,
their glistening white foam
tickling my toes with bubbles and warmth.

they push and pull and topple seashells onshore,
their distant fatherly clouds pounding down,
and they lap, lap, lap the sand at my feet,
not always waiting for my command.

in wild waves they come to my beach,
and though i try to clear the sticky salt,
it seeps in, breathes through my skin,
and together we intertwine our arms and swim.

In This World

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with the words
O my brothers
O my brothers
Anthony Burgess
stings my ears with
a new kind of violence
just as the wind
stings my skin
and the sun
stings the cold away
and before i miss it
i stop, the rogue farm
on one side of my
place in this world,
the corporate conglomerate
on the other,
and snap the photos
to record the moment:
2,000 miles in
not twelve, but eleven months,
the same day i discover
i’ve walked fifty in seven days
(108,688 steps)
and though they are numbers
(just numbers?)
they represent everything
that is possible,
that i believe,
that i thinkicanithinkicanithinkican
do in this world.