Coconut spoke too much

Apple met a pear

Bananas never felt so good

Strawberries have hair

Blue are the berries

Round like tears

I shall never live

a life based on fear

I like the works of Charles Bukowski. He reminds me of a wet cigarette in between your fingers as you try to keep the cherry from the rain.

The coffee is still shooting steam from its cover, and I am alone with my thoughts. They can lead you into madness.

I watch myself from twenty minutes ago, standing in the kitchen, that streak of venom I felt in my chest had started to burn. Where was that venom produced?

I suppose Charles Bukowski comes to mind when I’m feeling that red-hot emotion of rage. I’m the cherry on the cigarette hanging on for dear life as I’m being dragged on during a downpour.

I’m screaming on the inside, and it’s getting loud in my head. Where are the earplugs? How do I drown out the sound? How can I shut up the voices telling me to take the end of the cigarette and throw it into a pile of dried leaves so I can watch it burn?

Be quiet.

That’s the old you, remember her?

I guess I’ll write then…

Birth an idea

Birth a soul

Birth someone

You’re soon to know

Raise an army

of the dead

wish you could see

inside my head

“Why burn bridges?” my cousin asks me, on the snowy globe of his mother’s home.

How can he see, as he stands tall like a king, that he is only a court jester?

All I did was set the match ablaze and toss it in front of me to expose the puddles of gasoline that had been laid beneath me by those I trusted. I don’t burn bridges; they burn themselves.

I should hand him some matches, maybe give him a chance to see how underlined it all is. Like a chapter in a book, I’ve read it all before.

I should buy him a helmet, as he seems to be pedaling towards the same story that sits on our family’s dusty shelf.

It’s tired.

I guess that’s why I write. I’d like some new stories. Maybe a change in what we all know to be “right” and “wrong”. I’d say everyone could get over themselves. Maybe I’m “wrong” for that. Oh well…

There is a woman

Like a barrel-breasted fish

If you asked

She’d tell you I’m a bitch

I love her, though

and that’s a fact

Your girl can play

Tit for tat

“Just curious…” my mother ends her question with an addendum. The answer to her question is six weeks…

Six weeks from when he came to the front desk, where I was stationed at work, and said he wanted to disappear into the Green Mountains, and I replied, “Take me with you.”

She wanted to know how long I had known him before entering into the life-altering commitments of homesteading, marriage, and a family. It was a far cry from the declarations I had made beforehand, of never enmeshing myself with a man in any way ever again.

A lesson in what we think we have control over in our lives.

It’s what happened when I decided not to fight the flow. I had been fighting it for so long that I had become stoic in vulnerable situations and never allowed anyone in.

Truth is, I had no idea he intended to thaw the ice around my soul, and the warmer I became, the clearer I began to see what it was that I had been holding onto. It’s always easiest to swim with the current; how hadn’t I known that?

Love is joy, pain, and agony. Love is being vulnerable at the risk of someone seeing all sides of you, the good and the bad. Love is always showing up with pure intentions.

And so, as I asked, he took me with him.

They tried to keep me here.

It’s all I can think of sometimes as I sift through the silverware drawer that used to be mine, in what used to be my home. It’s like entering a time capsule, one in which nothing has changed, as if two people haven’t become ghosts.

I sometimes find myself pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the library. I often sit outside on the double wooden swing, the one my father used to join me on, before he’d complain about the cost of it.

Like a hermit crab outgrowing a shell, then crossing its path over and over, it causes a bit of reflection. The woman who made this her home and stifled her soul to fit into a smaller space needed to be awakened.

What was it that awakened me?

There had been so many seeds planted over the years, I had wondered which was the first sprout to breach the soil. Once the cultivation began, the weeds had become overgrown, and there was no going back to that short manicured lawn.

They tried to keep me there. It’s sometimes all I can think of when remembering what I had to do to get here.

Listen, pay attention

Something to mention

When you’re quiet

When you’re still

You hear the truth

A useful skill

Let them Tattle

Let them Tale

On themselves

It never fails