Loving the Tattooed Lady

An orchard of pain

was tattooed along the curves

of her body.

The colors and waves of light,

tendrils of ink telling her

story.

I ran my fingers along the

outlines of her pains and the

tale of each skin painted picture.

She bit on the edge of her

thumbnail, lost in some memory,

looking outward, into the past.

I was delicate in my touch,

as she recalled each tattooed

broken heart borne on her sleeve.

Stories written in blood,

over flesh, scars and time,

now elegant and masterpieces of coping.

Velvety red roses dappled in sunlight and

dew, masterfully drawn to tell the

story of the loss of her mother.

Orange and yellow flames flickering in the shadow

of the curve of her spine, to

illustrate a near fatal car accident.

Thick green thorny vines wound around her

hip and across her belly, her connection

to her lost child.

Bright azure birds in flight on her

shoulder blades over a blackened sky

to mark her rise over an ever-present sadness.

Each flourish of ink; pinks, blues,

purples and yellows, flashing vibrantly,

a swirling testimonial of survival.  

I became aware of my silence,

awash with teary-eyed tenderness for the

tough, tattooed woman.

She lit a cigarette and exhaled,

blue white smoke filling the space above her head,

a halo drifting in the waning daylight.

She spoke softly, white blanket pulled

modestly over her legs, plainly speaking

as I plainly listened.

A carefully crafted orchard of pain,

etched lovingly across her skin,

bravely hiding everything, and nothing.

I Don't Know

The most wonderful thing

I have learned is that I don’t

really know anything.

It’s quite odd, this wonderful thing.

I’ve preconceptions,

notions, ideas, concepts,

abstract thoughts,

but know nothing.

I thought I knew a lot.

I thought I had some of

this whole living thing

worked out; alas, I don’t.

I understand a great deal,

which has led me to this

discovery of my illusion of

knowledge.

It’s both terrifying and

grand. It’s scary to learn

that everything I thought

I knew was mostly inaccurate.

It’s grand because it gives me

a chance to re-think, re-start,

re-organize and reevaluate

my relationships.

It’s also irritating as I’ve been

sort of stuck in the same thing

for a long time and getting un-stuck

is a serious hassle.  Serious. Hassle.

In this discovery of knowing nothing,

I’m conflicted with the old ways of seeing

things, the new way of seeing things and

deciding which way is right for me.  

A minefield of historical errors of

prologue to review, to suffer renewed

embarrassments over, light shame, and

nostalgic bashful chuckles to ruminate on.

It is in knowing that we know nothing,

that we can begin to find wisdom, and wisdom

is the art of accepting that knowledge is

transitory.

Still though, it is odd,

considering how much I thought,

I knew, about everything, only to

find out, I don’t even know.

The Complainies

I’m being poked by an

irritant of some kind.

It’s persistent and

gnawing. It’s making me

irritable and annoyed.

It’s the Complainies!

Ah, yes. The Complainies.

I get the Complainies every so

often. Usually when I feel like

nothing is going my way.

Even when things are going

my way, I can still sometimes

get the Complainies. Actually,

the Complainies can be rather

unpredictable.

They can sneak up on me,

“Jeeze, look at that idiot drive,” I say.

Or, “I’m so tired of online dating.”

“Why is this taking so long,” or,

“Everyone here is dumb but me.”

I don’t really mean any of it.

(Except the online dating thing;

that’s just batshit nonsense and I

hate everything about it.)

I’ve just got the Complainies.

The Complainies make me hate

things, hate you, hate me, hate them,

hate those that tell me not to hate,

hate the haters, and generally hate the

whole damn stupid world’s face.

But I don’t. I don’t really hate it.

I recognize that the world isn’t

a perfect place and it’s unreasonable

to expect it to be so. I know that it’ll

all be okay with a little perseverance.

In the meantime though,

I’ll complain, moan, be disgruntled,

annoyed and be generally sarcastic,

until I’ve gotten all the

Complainies out of my system.

Please bear with this slight bout

of the Complainies, it’ll pass

soon enough and I’ll be back to

my slightly miserable and mildly

optimistic lovable self.

Not As Easy As It Looks

How can I say,

what I want to say,

without really knowing,

what it is I want to say,

and be coherent and relatable

to those that matter?

The flowery language

I keep using is making me

nauseous. I don’t want to

write another poem slathered

in pretension and soaked in

profundity.

I’m not even sure that I want

it to matter, considering the

transitory nature of things,

the state of flux and change

so constant all the time; would

it matter?

A poem carved into a stone

will eventually fade with the

passage of time, even granite

will give up the etched words

to the stalking ravages of

progress.

The superfluous words,

crowding the edges of my brain,

want to fit and fill this page,

but they are meaningless and

trite, signifying absolutely

nothing.

The meaning I mean to

mean is without meaning.

I suppose I should have known

what I wanted to say before I got

this far along, before I ever even

got to the end.

Poetry is hard.

Storm Watching

                Gray green clouds rolled through the summer sky. Clouds heavy with a storm. The thunder already echoing through the air. The wind picked up. The leaves on the trees shuddered in unison. Litter and other debris tumbled down our neighborhood street on the edge of the breeze. A flash of lightening followed by thunder rippling across the sky.

                “If you count between the flash of lightening and the clap of thunder, you can figure out how many miles away the storm is,” said my father.

                He unfolded a metal lawn chair on our concrete front porch. The chair was typical for the early 1980’s, late 1970’s. It was a rounded metal frame with a weaved seat and back. The pattern was a sort of plastic flannel, light green and dark green, outlined with white. It’s the sort of chair you see in all the Polaroid pictures of the era; ubiquitous at summer parties, strewn about some long driveway or at a park.  There was usually some overweight Uncle or Aunt sitting in them, a brown liquor in one hand, perhaps a long cigarette in the other hand. That lawn chair was utilitarian and everywhere.

                “How do I count, like, just the seconds or do I count like, one Mississippi, two Mississippi…,” I asked.

                “You can use the Mississippi’s. That a full second. It’ll reveal exactly how far and how fast the storm is moving,” said my father.

                “Cool,” I said.

                I sat on the concrete step of the front porch and waited for the next thunder clap. My father opened an Old Style and sat in the lawn chair. The sky darkened. The azure summer sky was fading into black. Cars driving down our busy one-way city street were turning their headlights on as the afternoon seemed to turn to night. I felt the static in the air on the hairs of my arms. The wind was whipping around and bending the grass in sweeping swirls as if brushed by an invisible hand. I could smell the dampness of the rain in the swirling air.

                “I do love a good thunderstorm,” said my father.

                He sipped from his can of beer loudly and sighed heavily; as if the effort of drinking from the can had somehow exhausted him. I didn’t say anything. It was probably his sixth can of beer that day. He’d be asleep by nine.

                The sky cracked and a flash as bright as day illuminated the gathering darkness.

                “Start counting,” said my father.

                I began my Mississippi’s. I got to three when the boom of thunder rattled across the sky. I looked over my shoulder at my father.

                “Three miles away,” he said.

                “Neat,” I said.

                The storm rolled in. It was eating up the warmth that had so filled the morning. The breeze had cooled everything as it rushed forward at the front of the storm.  I started to hear the fat raindrops ping against the aluminum gutters. I could hear them splat against the sidewalk in front of the porch.

                “Here it comes,” said my father. He was excited. It was normally hard to tell.

                The clouds opened and sheets of rain began to fall. The rain seemed biblical. The rain was the wrath of God pouring down on the guilty and innocent alike. I had to step back from the top step of the stoop. I moved to the side of my father’s folding chair under the awning. He was laughing. The noise of the storm, the thunder and lightning, the pounding rain smacking against the ground, wasn’t enough to drown out my father’s cackle. He did love a good thunderstorm.

                The wind started to blow the heavy rain towards us and we started getting wet. The rain was coming in thick waves of water. It reminded me of going through a car wash. The streets quickly filled and the bare dirt spot by the maple tree in front of the house was flooding. We were getting splashed by the heavy rain.

                “We’d better go in,” said my father.

                He stood from the lawn chair and folded it quickly. He pulled open the aluminum front door and I sneaked into the house under his arm. He followed me in quickly just as the rain began to pummel the front door. The storm window was still in. I stood looking at the rain hit the glass, churning like a washing machine.

                My father put the lawn chair up against the bookcase in the foyer and went into the living room. He turned on the TV. I stood at the door.  Lightening flashed. Thunder followed immediately.

                “It’s right over us,” I said.

                I looked into the living room as my father clicked his way through the remote control, looking for something to watch on TV.  I stayed at the screen door seeing my own young reflection in the glass of the storm window mixed with the streaks of rain on the outside.

                The storm moved down our street as quickly as it had arrived. The black sky, the green gray clouds drifting East, opening up to the sun, still shining over it all.

The Best Air to Breathe

A minute to breathe,

the hot air of laughter

swirling around my head,

pleasing my lungs in

chuckles, guffaws, and

giggles.

A bellowing howl,

a peel of thunderous

laughter, echoing

through the night

as we revel in each other’s

mirth.  

The best medicine,

laughing tears streaming over

apple cheeks, braying and

clasping hands over our mouths

as to slow the escape of announced

joys.

The silly sounds of hilarity,

bouncing off the walls,

louder and louder we laugh,

each of us nearly deafened from

the squeals of unbridled and

spontaneous eruptions of amusement.

Each next breath, mixed with a smile,

mixed again with a new hilarious

embarrassing story, the next anecdote,

to be followed again with belly bouncing

cackles and musical chortles. A group of

non-stop cries of delight and joyful noises.

It is hysterical nonsense,

played up to its finest levels,

unrepentant and unequivocal;

satire, joshing, tangents of pure

lunacy, performed for one another

to illicit even larger bursts of laughter.  

The best air to breathe.