Cutting the Cord

Your long silence

You could be dead.

But, so could I.

Awake alternatives a stately reel

in quarter time. The fiddler

switches to a dirge and a

rotating paceline parades

through places I have lived.

It passes your door, pauses.

You do not emerge, not even

for the cymbals, not even

for the hurdy gurdy man.

Egg

When I was ever so much younger than I am now,
a classmate cracked an egg
and let it drip through his fingers.
The assignment was to draw a hand holding an egg.
It didn't specify.
So he cracked that egg and let the white slide down past his knuckles,
while the yolk remained cradled in his palm.
I've never forgotten that sketch
or the hand which held the egg
or the hand that drew it.
If I was a palmist, able to read hands, I would have read his.
I wanted to read his hand, trace the lines, see what his future was
where he would go, learn, achieve and who he would become.
I wanted so to read myself into his future.
I wanted so to be the yolk cupped in his palm
while everything else slipped away

Lunar Eclipse

I have not written here in a week. Oh, I've written. I am almost always writing, even when I have writer's speedhump, I am writing something or other. Indeed, last week I wrote a ‘started out 2500 ended up being 4200 word' story, a few partial poems, some short essays and sundry others. In fact tonight, home from class, I did a first draft of an assignment due in three weeks.
After doing some other research, studying and contemplating my future as if it were a navel orange, I intent to watch the moon. My future as seen in an orange. The oracle of Delphi was much more polite and not as lint filled, but an orange is handier. An orange, the lovely, soon to be eclipsed moon, both ridgy spheres. There are tiny depressions, craters in the surface. These craters give you a better grip when you want to hold onto this sphere.
It is the same when you love someone. The imperfections, those tiny ridges, are what you hold close. The imperfections make us each unique. The way we each want to be respected, desired, given credence, loved is what makes us special. And our flaws, so many flaws? To be loved as much despite yourself as because of yourself is what each person wants. We each know our faults, and they are so much larger in our own mind than anywhere else.
Nobody can flagellate us as well as we do, no one. But the beloved will take the whip from my hands, set it aside. Accept the flaws and treasure them as much as the perfections, pressing fingers into those tiny depressions to keep me from drifting away on breath of wind. Fingers are not chains holding me down. They hold me close, tight, but not down. I can feel the wind but not be blown off course by it. The imperfections catch the wind, too, but are not conquered by it. Wind is just wind.
Full moon tonight. I look up and its beauty takes my breath away. If it were perfect, a smooth glass orb, it would not be as lovely. I can stare for hours at this moon, the shadows, ridges, its cycle of new to full and back again. Never the same, but still the same. Loved for being itself. What else can it be except itself? What else can I be except me?

What Is In The Cards?

She wondered if this was an omen, that disembodied voice calling out, "No new messages." Before, the little man had been a harbinger of good tidings of great joy. Now he was still as the tomb.
Did familiarity breed contempt? Was there a casualness resulting from increased availability? She rejected the question before it was even fully formed as irrelevant to her life. How increased? A few more hours here and there? More telephone time? The increase in time they allotted each other directly correlated to increased stress and strife in their real world lives. Ergo, all good negated.
She closed the laptop. If she couldn't see the blank screen, it didn't exist. Keep your head in the sand at all times possible and even at times impossible. Ignore what you will. The world will go on with or without your consent and say so.
Say so. The things he said to her. She drummed her fingers on the laptop. Open it? Check mail again? No. Leave it be. For now. Remember their last conversation. Caring without tipping over into solicitous platitudes or falsehood. Patient. Balanced. It was foreign to each of them. They'd never... Or never in a million years anyway. This newborn life to walk through, so tentative after eons of familiar. Uncharted, after sleepwalking with eyes open only when the tension and anger boiled over. Which it did. Often. Too often.
To live and know your life was wrong, but not see a way to fix it was painful. Wake to hopelessness, sorry to be awake. Filled with such despair that the nightly prayer had morphed into "If I should die before I wake... Let me die before I wake. Please let me die." And now this. This quiet. The very thought of which made her smile. Even feeling ignored, she smiled. Pulled the ugly green paisley blanket higher on her shoulders.
Her cell chirped. And his name flashed on the screen.

Do You Know Who You Are?

We are each other's
Only when we're together
Oh god, I miss you...

I carry your scars:
Your sins eaten with each kiss
Balm and Gilead.

Tired? So tired.
Sleep will heal you, beloved,
Moon casts sun shadow

Sweet eclipse of sweat
Soaked skin. Forget-me-not? Yes.
Your need calls to me

Gears mesh. We are meant...
For what? We are transient
I'll not cry for you
I tell a beautiful lie
Who do I protect? Not me.