Topic: There's a blue bird in my heart

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-07-28 11:54 EST

JULY 25th, 2010

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

My mother would tell me all the time that we were poor.

Not always in so many words but she loved to remind me and her, I guess, at any chance she could get. She'd walk me down the street sometimes and point at the men in clean, pressed suits, or the fancy, shiny cars idling in the traffic. Sometimes we'd take the bus and she'd spend hours pointing at the women with the prettiest clothes, jewelry and handsomest men. She'd point and say how she never had that as a little girl and she'd never be able to afford it now, because we were poor. But if I went to school and read my books, maybe I wouldn't end up like her.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

My earliest memories of her were on the fire escape in the summer. She'd complained of the heat earlier. The heat never bothered me back then, I was a kid and I swear all children refill via the sun and warmth while it just drained the life out of adults. She spent most of her time when she was home outside, smoking. Which, as I grew older became a point of dark humor but this story isn't about me being older. It's about that point in time, this time when she decided I needed to have my weekly reminder that we were poor.

The thing is? At that age I didn't even know we were poor. She could point all she wanted and explain all she liked but my mind simply would not wrap around it. Children don't collect terms of have and have-nots. They think in daydreams, instincts. Are we hot? Cold? Scared? Safe? Fed? Happy? Sad? Tired? Awake? What's that? Who's there? Am I a pilot today or an astronaut?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

Children don't think in limits. They think in stars; endless and bright.

We had an apartment that kept most of the rain, snow, wind and weather from us. The toilet usually worked, the sink had water. At night, the fridge would whine loudly and I'd imagine metal robots dispensing evil vegetables. My clothes came from a place called the Salvation Army and I thought that was pretty neat.

She called me over late one night when the summer was limping along under the weight of her own heat. Chain smoking her Marlboro reds, she leaned over the metal railing wearing a thin, worn shift. The closer I came the clearer I could hear her smoke, too. Deep inhale with a quick, sharp exhale that billowed outward then hung in the stale, hot air. I didn't like it when she smoked like that. It meant she was annoyed.

I loved my mother always as a little girl except when she was annoyed.

"Look," she said, jerked her head in a downward nod. I didn't want to, but I did anyway. There was a sleek, black limousine in the garbage strewn side street below. Its engine purred dangerous as cornered cats. I watched without word as my mother?s friends, women who lived in the same building as us, gathered around it. I didn't know why, but I will forever see this part of this memory as moths beating their wings uselessly against light bulbs.

"You see that?" my mother's voice turned raspy. Five years from now I would finally understand what it meant. That the word I wanted to use was: bitter. She cupped my face harshly to make sure I was actually paying attention. I had the habit of looking at people. Nodding at people. Speaking to people and fooling them. But I wasn't really there. I was day dreaming elsewhere.

"Anyone ever tells you they better than you because they got money is a fxcking liar. You can throw money at a dirty dog all you like, but he still stinks like shxt. The only difference between a rich man and a poor man is that a rich man's got enough money to pay someone to forget about what he did and a poor man's got nobody who gives a shxt about what he's doing." Her fingers pressed hard enough to almost bloom bruises. "You ain't no different or no worse or better because of where or how you were born.

"Go to school, Poesy. Go to school. Read books. And don't you ever, ever rely on anyone, especially a man for nothin'." She let go of my face and as I sighed with relief, focused elsewhere. She tossed the cigarette over the balcony and grinned in a manner that always frightened me as it bounced off the hood of a car, sparking.

"You hear me?"

"Go to school. Read books. Don't rely on anyone, especially a man," I parroted best as I could without sounding bored. Every week, the same lecture. The words showed up in my dreams some times, burning my retinas with their horrible day-glo colors, floating over whatever I was dreaming about. GO TO SCHOOOOOL, a talking rat would tell me. READ BOOKS, king Arthur once said from his throne. DON'T RELY ON MEN, a talking pencil sharpener during one of my at school dreams said.

I hated them. I hated hearing them. I hated that she felt like repeating them and childishly hated her in these snap shots of her second hand smoke bitterness, but it was an immature hate. I hated all this the same way I hated having to eat peas and broccoli back then.

I wish I could go back and tell her how god damn wise those words were.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?*

*Poem ? Charles Bukowski

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-07-29 15:26 EST

JULY 26Tth, 2010

You are the roast beef I have purchased
and I stuff you with my very own onion.

You are a boat I have rented by the hour
and I steer you with my rage until you run aground.

You are a glass that I have paid to shatter
and I swallow the pieces down with my spit.

You are the grate I warm my trembling hands on,
searing the flesh until it's nice and juicy.

You stink like my Mama under your bra
and I vomit into your hand like a jackpot
its cold hard quarters. *

Our school yard was a church to pavement. It was covered in bright paint, graffiti like memorials of smiling children, cute things. Hopscotch marred sections in bright yellow or pink sprawled in tar coated black; hieroglyphs to innocence.

It's hard to be innocent long in certain areas of a city, when every day you pass by homeless drunks begging for change, business men slowing down to unroll their windows at women lining gum-splattered sidewalks. Or coming home to a sink full of empty beer bottles, hollow glass with Smirnoff labels gleaming as if to mock when your belly rumbled for a supper that momma drank.

It helped if you had your head in a cloud most of the time and the use of the school's library for books though.

I was good at an early age at missing things. I can't really say if that was my own way of protecting myself or the foolishness of being young. There were signs all around me--signs my mother falling to the beast of human nature, biting onto her own tail and letting whatever darkness life had handed her eat her soul all up. The 'boy friends' that waltzed in and out of our apartment and lives. The way my mother would scream at me if they looked at me funny, the way they would never stay longer than a few months before they'd scream at one another.

The way she looked at me, the older I got. As if by growing my own pair of breasts I was declaring war. I had no idea what war I had declared or what I was fighting for, but apparently once I had my own it was too late.

I'm getting a head of myself, however.

The first time I finally, finally understood that we were poor? That the things my mother tried to tell me in her clumsy way were true started at school. I was maybe ten, eleven. The edges of my awareness were crowded in. I started seeing the difference between my nonexistent lunch and the pretty pink lunch boxes some of the girls in my class had. My loose, over-sized second hand shirts with holes or nearly worn-see-through patches and their darling dresses. My taped and super glued metal, donated glasses too big for my face and their designer little circles or squares. We kids started taking lessons from our parents and drawing lines in the pavement. Packs of us roamed together according to what the world taught us.

I played with a girl named Samantha, dark hair and dark eyes. I hope she grew into a Neruda poem when she grew older. She had an older sister who wasn't remotely beautiful. She was in grade seven and already painted her lips red. It didn't match her flat little reptile eyes.

We were playing with side-walk chalk. I was drawing little girls with wings, arguing over the fact that they weren't angels at all and sure as hell little girls could have wings--when Samantha's sister marched up. She grabbed Sam's hand and jerked her upright.

"Momma tol' you not to play with her." Sam yowled and whined, while her sister began to drag her away.

"H-hey!" I stood up, shocked. Chalk rolled from my lap and shattered in glass rainbows on the black pavement. "What're you doin'?"

Her sister whirled about to fix me with a flat glare that made me cringe. "My momma sees yours workin' the corner every night. You're mom's a whore and whores are dirty. You're dirty too. You're not allowed to play with Sam anymore and if you do, I'll tell my mom and she'll find you and whup you good."

I think that I wrote children were all instincts and day dreams. I became instinct that moment and just remember being angry. So, so, so angry. Sam's older sister was screaming and holding her mouth, my knuckles were bloody. Sam wouldn't look at me, there were kids all around us hooting, screaming, laughing. I dimly remember being hauled inside by a teacher. The hallways and doors blurring together. Being talked to. Phone calls. All I could think was that it wasn't true. My mother wasn't a whore. She wasn't. She worked nights. That's what she told me and my mother wouldn't lie.

She wasn't perfect, but she was my mother. My mother. She raised me and gave me a home and that meant something. It meant that she might say or do things that didn't make sense and hurt me right now--but surely she was only doing it because she loved me? Because she was protecting me.

Mother is a word that means the world to children. Mother wouldn't lie.

That's what I had stuck in my head on the way home, at any rate. When I, in tears and babbling nonsense ran up flights of paint-chipped stairs to the beat in door of my apartment and shoved it open--wailing--I burst into my mother?s room.

My mother looked up from the bed, glassy eyed and naked. There were four men in her room and they didn't stop when I came through. Neither did she.

Stunned, I backed out of the door and through the living room, kitchen, and out of the apartment entirely.

Funny thing that. My mother was a whore and little girls didn't get to have wings either.

*Buying the Whore, Anne Sexton.

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-07-30 11:03 EST

JULY 27th, 2010

I want to write
I want to write the songs of my people.
I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark.
I want to catch the last floating strains from their sob-torn
throats.
I want to frame their dreams into words; their souls into
notes.
I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl;
fling dark hands to a darker sky
and fill them full of stars
then crush and mix such lights till they become
a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.*

My life really isn't as bad as my memories make it out to be.

I never thought it was all that bad.

I never thought it was because it was all I knew. And even when I write these things out in my note books--when I see them in black and white they don't hurt.

They're ...me. These are all the things that went into making me. Fxcked up or not, this is how it was and now, here I am. I could cry about it some more but no one cares. Everybody is all a little fxcked up themselves, worried about their own messed up lives and heads. I know I've got to take care of me. I've known that for a long time.

So I do.

At least, I pretend I do. I don't know. Everyone with a mock degree in head shrinking would probably be willing to point out that diving into imaginary worlds and books isn't their idea of coping.

It is mine, though.

See, all of my good memories are tinged with paper cuts; too excited turns of the page too quickly, ink and paperback scent, dust and libraries. I love that smell. I love books. My safe place, my harbor. I remember the way the sun would radiate through the city library windows, the bright cut outs for children and the rainbow of book covers. I remember trailing my hands along the backs of them like a woman takes her hand to a mans chest in passing; lover's touch. I remember that whenever school got rough, whenever I thought I couldn't make it, whenever my mother showed up at my dorm strung out and drunk--there were books.

They never failed me. They were always there. They would always be there short of a fire or flood. They never asked anything of me but a little time and gave me everything in return.

Some people might think that's the saddest thing in the world.

To me, it was everything. It still is.

So it might seem like a pity party all up in here, but it isn't. This is who I am. This is where I came from.

Every time I get to feeling down all I have to do is take a look around and know: It wasn't that bad.

Right?

P.S. Going on vacation. Right now. On a whim. Should be able to book the flight today, the woman on the phone with unpronounceable name says they always have seats available. I got this pamphlet in the mail with six new rejection letters; it's amazingly cheap and I should be suspicious but I am just...If I get one more rejection letter...I don't know.

It's a trip to a place called Rhy'din. Looks like some sort of Con or reenactment sort of place. Supposedly a whole city. I can't think of a better place to go.

*I want to Write, Margaret Walker

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-07-31 21:31 EST

JULY 27th, 2010 9:05PM MIDFLIGHT TO RHY'DIN

And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.*

You ever sweep up your place in a hurry? You get a phone call and company is on their way. They don't take your polite no for an answer because their either family that does that or that one nosebag of a friend that just likes to barge in and remind you, you aren't a hermit. And you look around your apartment in horror and go--Jesus Christ! What a mess?

So you scurry around the place and pick up your filth. The underwear you forgot by the couch, the empty ice cream container on the counter, the magazines, the clean clothes you forgot to fold and shove it all into this closet. Finally! Your apartment is clean. Oops. There's this one sock on the floor. So you pick it up and open the closet to shove it in there and everything from the closet explodes all over everything.

That's sort of how everything in my life went after I turned twelve.

My mother was a woman who was amazing at going all out at things in her life. She was either an all-out alcoholic, and all out druggie, or all out sober and broken. I learned that I liked her the best when she was just buzzed, whatever it was she was doing. Anything past that was a tangled-ball of snot and tears or bitterness and rage.

My closet opened on one of those bitter, tear filled nights. She'd come rolling in the door as she usually did stinking drunk in a little red thing that made me feel awkward every time I ticked my eyes her way. Her mascara was smeared, her eye blackened. She kept sobbing too hard to tell me what happened and was too drunk to find her mouth with a cigarette. So I put her to bed and listened to her try and tell me what had happened and I nodded, pet her arm.

When she was done hours later I wearily crawled from her bed to mine. I didn't mind sleeping on the couch in the living room. I told the kids in my class my bedroom had a balcony and a television. It was only a little white lie...

All the lights were off. Didn't matter really though, because the city's glow penetrated everywhere here and showered our tiny room. I was so tired I should have noticed there was something standing at the edge of the couch. I reached forward to lift the sheets when long fingers the color of swamp-water curled around my wrist. They were as cold as ice cubes.

She said her name was Mandy, and she needed me to help her write a story.

She couldn't write it, you see.

She was dead.

*Excerpt of the poem, All Hallows, by Louise Gl?ck.

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-05 11:25 EST

JULY 27th, 2010 11:07PM MIDFLIGHT TO RHY'DIN

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Mandy wasn't the first one to put her hand on my shoulder and whisper in my ear.

I call it whispering, but I don't think that's what it is. I can't always know when they're near me. I don't always see them. Sometimes it gets cold, sometimes I hear people taking in empty rooms--words I can barely make out as if I leaned my ear against a thick door. Occasionally they moved things. Mom yelled at me for moving her purse, her clothes, her candles, her cross, the cartons in the fridge, the dishes. Things moved and others broke; Mom yelled at me for that too. Depending on her state of sobriety she'd yell at me for the things she broke.

But she was out of it so much most of the time she didn't care to notice these things moved while I was asleep. Or at school. Not even home.

The lights in our apartment used to flicker on bright sunny days. I never thought anything of that back then because we lived in a shxthole apartment. It should have been condemned years ago--but the landlord was greedy. Happy to take our rent and never fix anything. We just thought it was brown outs and faulty wiring. It wasn't until the same issue plagued me through foster homes, college and finally, into my own apartment--which was not a shxthole, that I began to associate it with my new friends. We used to have cats meander by the hallway and I'd pet them and feed them. Once Mandy and the others began whispering in my ear, they no longer came. They would hiss and back away from me.

Of all the things I miss most, I think it's the cats.

And there I go saying they whispered again. That's a habit, it's a convenient word. But there's nothing 'whispering' about having hours of your day or night disappear; waking up at the kitchen table with your mother yelling at you What the fxck is your problem? I've been standing here, trying to talk to you for two hours and all you do is write? Or blinking out of a lecture with your note book furiously filled with the story of a dead man in place of notes...And the final's coming. Or sending in a manuscript, only to have it rejected and a note scribbled in red across the top: Is this a joke? It's not very funny. In the middle of your story there are 58 pages of HELP ME HELP ME LISTEN LISTEN HELP ME HELP ME typed, in all caps, glaring black on white.

I have suitcases filled with hand written stories. Some of the older ones don't understand computers or type writers. I learned early to keep all of these things close to me at night. It was rarer for them to bother me during the day. So at night when little girls dreamed about handsome princes and beautiful mansions, white picket fences or becoming astronauts, I was busy writing for the dead.

I learned words like evisceration and rape and murder and rot earlier than most girls should have. I learned that they didn't scare me like it should have. I'd lived all this time with my mother. As if it were a precursor course, a means of preparing me for what was to come.

I went to 'scary' movies with my sparse friends in college and never jumped at the things that went bump in the night.

Mandy's long gone now. I told her story. They do that once I write it down. They go away.

At first, I was so relieved that they did that. Now, as I get older and there's nothing in my room but a bed, a laptop and suitcases filled with paper...I think I begin to miss them.

I'm not sure yet if that should be amusing or frightening.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Poem ? Marge Piercy

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-11 09:19 EST

JULY 27th, 2010 10:44PM RST (RHY'DIN STANDARD TIME)

While those around him criticize and sleep
And through a fracture on that breaking wall
I see you my friend and touch your face again
Miracles will happen as we trip
But we're never gonna survive unless
We get a little crazy
No we're never gonna survive unless
We are a little
Cray cray crazy*

I have apparently landed in crazy town. Toot, toot, all aboard the crazy train to crazyville with the crazies.

So I'm in mid-flight and I just put my notebook down and the pilot gets on the mysterious pilot P.A. system. I hear the usual drill about thanking us for flying with them and his name (which I never really pay attention to) when he casually informs us there will be slight turbulence as they hit the nexus. Nothing to worry about, he reassures, and the passengers around me don't even look up from whatever they're doing.

It took me a few seconds after the pilot clicked off and the sound of the airplanes engines for my brain to really pick apart what he'd said. Eventually the oddities in his speech caught me: What the fxck is a nexus and why are we hitting it? With an airplane? Wasn't that, you know, not how you make the flying go? I opened my mouth to ask the seat across from me what that meant when all hell broke loose.

The lights flickered; anything not held onto or battened down went flying (read: since I apparently was the only newbie on this flight, my note book sailed, my pen, my magazine and my empty plastic cup), the stewardess' were no where to be seen. I could hear the strangest hum. I want to remember it as electricity but electricity didn't sing with such resonance. All the little yellow face masks with plastic bags you only see in the movies exploded outward from above. They dangled like cheerful little hanged men while the airplane bounced along like rubber ball.

I might have screamed but it was lost in the sound of metal, strange thrumming and crackle of energy.

The oddest thing that I remember during this time--when I thought I was going to die--was that no one else on the plane looked alarmed. Not even the children. Mother's smiled to them and pet their heads lovingly. One man in a suit cut sharp and perfect flipped a page of his rumpling newspaper. He looked bored with it all and wanting nothing more than being off the plane. Another man was trying to eat skittles and cracking up every time his hand couldn't make it to his mouth due to the 'slight turbulence.'

And just as if someone reached out with giant hands to pick up the bouncing ball? It stopped.

I was the only one screaming.

I was also the only one embarrassed about it.

I didn't notice anything different until the woman in the seat across from me handed me back my notebook. Her hands. Her hands were different. A quick glance upward revealed to me that so was she. She glowed. She had the most amazing blue eyes and pointed ears. It's the pointed ears that caught me. She saw me slack-jawed and staring. She only gave me what I'd call a knowing smile and then went about gathering her luggage from over head.

Then there was this guy that squeezed by the rows of seats to leave...Must have been eight feet tall. He was hunkered over himself and bright green as grass with two huge tusks...And then this other guy, who had a tail that lashed about annoyed behind him..And then the woman who kept hiccuping and changing color every time...And god, this kid blinked at me and his eyes changed from normal to slit pupils like a cat...

It's crazy. This is crazy.

Toot, toot. Welcome to crazy town.

*Crazy lyrics, Seal

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-16 15:46 EST

JULY 27th, 2010 1:04 AM RST, @ THE RED DRAGON INN

Men.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.
When the earth rights itself again,
And taste tries to return to the tongue,
Your body has slammed shut. Forever.
No keys exist.**

You would think after all these years of writing I'd be able to come up with a handful of words to describe this place. Something poetic and bright, maybe, things that fall off the tongue and trip around in your heart for a couple of days after. But I never did get anything published and I don't think this place is made for that kind of poetry. Maybe not yet.

I found the inn I was supposed to have a room booked at because all the lamp lights in the cobblestone road seemed to gather together to glimmer especially pretty on its sign. If I didn't know any better I'd ramble on about magic or fairy dust in my eye. But I'm almost thirty and I wear glasses.

I passed by two carts pulled by horses--yes, horses--one was filled with sweet smelling hay and the other stocked full of right-out-of-the-past oaken barrels, kept together only by pressure and blackened iron bands. I spent a few moments studying some of the clothing of the people walking by. The women...the women here make Hollywood look ugly.

When I opened the front door after crossing the porch, there are also no words to describe what it's like stepping inside. I can compare it to many things, I guess. A tsunami of light, sound and smell. A texture overload--lamp light, candles and torches. Doors and old wood that has been here for so long some of it's graying. A hearth that eats up a vast room cluttered with cozy tables and intimate couches; wingbacks. I could say that I am certain I stepped into time. Not back into it, not forward--but time itself. There were so many people that where there, all different kinds and types. A woman with a tail. A man with a sword. A girl with a laptop. I was...I am in the middle of something I have no words for.

I could feel myself crumpling inward, crushed pages of a book.

I made it to the bar. I thought it was an accomplishment at the very least, and there was a woman with snow-blond hair that introduced herself and what seems like fifty of her friends.

Maranya. I don't...Vex something...I don't remember them all. Strange faces on the other side of my lenses. But she told me about this sign in book and that I could just put my name on a page and take a key. Then have a room...

How does this place make money?

I was--I was standing there looking like an idiot. I know, because you can feel it. Your brain goes blank and you feel your eyes go a little wide, you roll them back and forth but you feel glued to the spot. If you move, you'll call more attention to yourself. If you stay, the same. So you're stuck. Feet glued to the floor.

That's when a man with fire-eyes (no, really, that's not me trying to prose myself into a circle. His eyes literally were...I just..) came to my side.

There are men in this world that are pretty to look at. They draw attention. They are clean cut and wide shouldered, dress fancy and spend more time on their hair than I do.

Then there were men like him. Quiet, sharp-eyed. They didn't care about a room or pay any mind to those looking at them until they found something worthy of their attention. When they do, they grow the teeth of a shark and the claws of an eagle--they bite onto what they want, don't let go. They grab the morsel in their little claws and hold on tight while they carry them away. The world does not matter to them; only what they want at that moment.

These are the men that stood behind the kinds and queens, silently eating up continents with just their minds, while others did the dirty work for them.

Maybe. That's what I think anyway. I am probably getting ahead of myself.

He is everything I have always been afraid of. Silver and fire. He loomed.

He is trying to sink his teeth in already; there's a flickering in his shadow. I am not sure which bothers me more.

**Poem ? Men, by Maya Angelou

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-17 19:12 EST

JULY 28th, 11:04 AM, @ RED DRAGON INN ROOM

I couldn't call you a Doris,
An Edna,
A Milly...
Or Agnes...
Cheap names,
Lining these streets like the grubby paper
Inside the drawers of boarding houses.

An icicle name like that
Would forever freeze
The fires of your heart.

Does an...
Agnes...
Sing of love on the stage?
Does an...
Agnes...
Give her midnight autograph
To the flustered crowds
Round the stage door lamp?
No.

So few have names
That drip with honey's gold.
Men's tongues shall stroke your name until it shines -
A star in orbit round the melting moon.**

I wrote earlier that my mother spent most of her time outside, smoking, and that it was a point of dark, bitter humor that likes to haunt me when I'm feeling particularly childish and want to blame my mother for all my own faults.

Do you know why she smoked outside on the fire escape? When she was sober enough to make it there without falling seven stories, that is. Get this: she told me, straight faced one day--a bruise on her cheek and track marks in her arm, "Smokin's bad for you Poesy. Don't ever do it--" and she'd take a deep drag, let it curl out her nose, between her teeth. "--it'll make you real sick."

My mother wouldn't smoke around me. The irony is that she was willing to shoot up, pass out, throw up on my papers, set fire to the kitchen, invite strange men into our house to have sex with them--but no sir-ree-bob, she wouldn't smoke around me. That was bad, it was.

It's when I think about her bitterly I like to drudge up this memory, to remind me that my mother was an odd, broken little bird. She had to fly the only way she knew how--which wasn't flying and not very good at all:

Winter in New York. As a kid it was far more amazing then, than it is now. All the filth on the sidewalks and smog on the buildings usually got covered in gleaming white. Snowflakes made patterns on windows before melting away or freezing. When I was little, I liked to imagine frost fairies visited glass and made art with ice and crystals, just for me, so when the morning sun broke through our little living room window it became a ray of light from some far-off magic crystal.

One morning my mother came home late, drunk and stumbling. My mother's make up always started out so well, it really did. She had a flair for painting on her masks, of drawing out her eyes and shadowing her nose and cheeks--of sculpting away bruises and tired circles. But by the time she got home in the morning she was a smeared mess of pale, mascara and eyeliner. Sometimes it was because she'd been crying. Sometimes I think it was the smudged thumbprints of men who could not stand looking her in the eyes anymore.

I remember her dress. It was vivid red and sequined, inch wide straps kept falling from her shoulders. She was in her junkie phase and had lost too much weight to keep it hanging there right. Square cut below her collar bones and short on the thighs, slit over one hip. Black stockings and black heels--it was beautiful and trashy all at once. My mother reminded me of what Jessica Rabbit might have looked like had she failed miserably at everything.

I wrapped myself in my blanket and crept toward the window. She wasn't sucking on the filter of her Marlboro furiously and so I knew I was safe to approach her. I tip toed the way knights tip toe toward dragon hoards.

"Mama?" I asked tentatively. I can still hear the way it sounds. Small, high notes--frightened but desperately driven to find the answer to the next question. My mother exhaled another bought of gray and white smoke, rolled her dark eyes my way and waited.

"Mama, why'd you name me Poesy?" I loved my name as a little girl. I'd never heard of anyone on my block ever having the same name, nor had I met a single other girl at school with it. It was mine, all mine, and I adored it. I didn't have to share it with anyone else but...after a while I began to worry--as kids do--as to why I was the only one to have it. Maybe it wasn't a good name? Maybe no one liked it, and that's why no other little girls had it. Maybe...maybe it was a really bad name.

My mother sighed through her nose, scattering the lazy smoke that hung in the cold air between us like a blanket. My mother reached out with bone-man's fingers to curl behind my head, wiggle into my hair and smooth her palm down to the back of my neck.

I was stunned.

My mother never touched me unless absolutely necessary. I don't think it was out of cruelty but because so many people touched my mother, whether she liked it or not--that she became unable to tell the difference between the kind of touches that brought smiles or the kind that gave you nightmares. So she just stopped touching anybody. It served to still me. As a little girl, as a child--we're always moving. Our minds are fawn-scrambling all over the place and we're never still, even in our heads. But my mother's touch made the winter world stop for me that day. I was paying her so much attention I noticed the way her lashes clumped together. A freckle by her mouth I'd never seen before, that there were the finest of blond hairs on her face that made her glow in the right light.

"So every time someone has your name in their mouth, baby girl, its poetry," my mother croaked. She took the last drag off her cigarette and tossed it over the side, dropping her hand.

Of course I didn't get it, then. I only looked at her with my brows drawing over my chilled nose as she rolled her eyes away and lit up another.

When I'm alone in bed and the sheets won't untangle and my pillow is a brick and I can't find a place in it that doesn't feel lonely...When I can't stop staring at the wall in the dark, when I know the god damn digital alarm clock doesn't tick anymore...It's then, that I get it. I mean, I really get it.

So many people must have spit her name out like a curse. Everyday, she must have heard men say her name like they would call a dog, or croon it to her in grease-slicked notes, staining it.

I know my mother loved me in her own way. She gave me a name that was poetry, no matter how it was spoken.

** Some Mothers are Content to Spoon Soot, poem ? Paul Bagder

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-19 19:38 EST

JULY 30TH, 3:40 AM, @ ROOM IN RED DRAGON INN

Shh It's okay, it's okay
This is our
Dirty, little, secret

We're all alone in the city
My hands are stoned with pity
I could get by or get high with fifty yeah
And I, I, I, don't feel pretty today***

Sweet sixteen.

Why do they call it sweet? There's nothing sweet about being a teenager. Your hormones dictate everything you do and your mood swings make a pregnant woman look stable and sane. If I wasn't crying every night into my pillow I was making awkward gestures to boys; desperately trying to get their attention whenever I was away from the watchful--sometimes hateful--eyes of my mother. I was saying things that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The sorts of things you wake up in the middle of the night over, screw your face up at the ceiling and ask yourself: what the fxck was I thinking? Seriously? Did I say that to him/her/them? I had pimples. I hated my body. I tried everything I could to make myself look different, be different without even knowing who I was yet.

I did things because everyone else was doing it. I stole my mothers cigarettes and starting smoking them so I could hang with a boy after school who was only there to stare at my tits and bum a Marlboro from me. (I thought then, of course, any attention was good attention and truuueeeee loooooove.) I never bothered putting two and two together, how when my mother ran out of money for the cigarettes and I didn't have any he'd rather spend time with his buddies calling me a lard ass.

At parties, everyone thought I was great, see, because I always had booze. My friends, if I could call them that, always said how awesome my mother was--because I'd lie and lie and lie and lie. I'd tell them how much of a free-spirit my mother was. That she didn't mind. That she'd given me the rum--and hey, want another cup?

I thought people liked me in high school.

All they liked was that they had empty cups and I would keep filling them, often at my own expense.

I don't know what it is that drives us as humans to be popular. To be liked. To be the center of someone?s universe, even for a second. My mother and I fought more. We didn't talk to begin with but now it was just a screaming match between either of us with the neighbors banging on the walls telling us to shut the fxck up. We started screaming at one another the moment we woke up and it was the last thing we did to one another before going to bed.

She screamed at me about Tykuan. He was tall, beautiful. The most perfect smile I'd ever seen and smooth skinned; velvet. He was 25 and seemed to know everyone. People circled him; the glitter of his gold jewelry winked in my dreams at night. He was well groomed, clean, he wore clothes with names attached to them I'd never heard of. He talked about things on television and things he'd learned from the streets and I ate it up. He looked at me and he looked at me with power, hunger and want.

A man. He wanted me. He didn't want to just stare at my tits or take my cigarettes or money or booze. He wanted me. He wanted to hear what I had to say, he read the things I wrote and he liked them. He never asked me about the mirrors or the crucifix, the chants or the salt--he didn't think I was nuts over it either. He laughed at my jokes. Not at me...but my jokes. He thought I was funny, talented, and beautiful. He told me I was beautiful.

He smelled like dusk--promises. Now that I am older I think about his scent and my stomach turns. He reminds me of the over perfumed, dog-eared, tear stained ruins of romance novels from the library. Worn out and over read by the desperate women unhappy with their lives.

Tykuan was dangerous, everything about him was dangerous. He was older, wiser, forbidden. My mother didn't want me dating, ever. Forbade me to even consider dating a boy, let alone a man. My mother and I screamed over Tykuan for ages. Everything in my life with my mother came to a head one night when I left in the middle the afternoon to pick her up a carton. I went to the same store she'd been sending me to since I was a kid, they all knew me and they all knew my mother and they didn't care as long as they made a sale. She knew exactly how long it would take me to get there and how long it would take me to get back.

When I came back up the bullet-hole riddled stairs of our apartment, I always stopped before it and put my ear to the door. Ever since I discovered what my mother was, I did this so I didn't walk in on her 'working' ever again. Though she did that less in the summer than the winter, usually because she would work a corner in ease when it was warm than cold.

My mother...She had this voice when she was working. She thought it was all sultry and sexy; to me, it sounded high-pitched and flat, more desperate and fake than anything. I could hear her through the door--I could hear her doing that voice. That meant she had a man in there and I should have turned around and found a book from my purse and settled in. That's what I always do.

Tonight I heard a familiar voice on the other end of the door moan.

I heard Tykuan. I heard Tykuan fxcking my mother.

I stood at the door and didn't do anything to stop them. A small voice at the back of my head, my mothers, repeated everything she'd ever told me about men over the years. Every single, vitriolic, bigoted, nasty thing she'd ever said. I liked to recall them in between my mother's oh yes big daddy's and Tykuan's grunts. I timed them, until it became a darkly amusing little song in my head.

When they stopped screwing one another, I turned the doorknob and walked in.

Part of me enjoyed watching Tykuan fall off the couch bare-assed and scramble for his clothes while stammering something I did pay attention to. Part of me made a note that they fxcked on the couch--which was where I slept--and a third part of me quietly filed away the smug, triumphant expression on my mother?s face as she twitched down her skirt and hiked her shirt back down over her chest. The smell of them still in the air, turning my stomach.

But I watched them the way snakes watched frozen mice; unimpressed, cold, distant. I felt it too.

Tykuan tried to touch me. "You got what you paid for, didn't you?" I asked him mildly. "Now get out. My mother's fxcked a lot of men, so don't forget to get tested," and I particularly enjoyed his reaction to the last. How he recoiled from me as if I burned him.

He walked out the door with his shirt in one hand. I watched the way his strong shoulders bunched, the muscle pull, the curve of his spine--I still like the way the light seemed to be eaten up in chocolate skin--but he was a specimen now and nothing more. The sound of my mother's zippo striking flint is what turned me around again. I took out the carton of cigarettes and approached her but...I was so far away. I wasn't me anymore; I was a tethered balloon of myself, looking down at two strangers.

My mother grinned. Grinned at me.

"I tol' ya, didn't I, Poesy? You see? I told you 'bout men, baby girl. What they were like. Your man weren't no better than all the rest of the walking dxcks that come strolling into my bed," she crowed. She took the carton from my unresponsive hands.

My mother was very proud of herself, you see. She had proven her point to me, and very well at that.

"Yes Mamma," I droned. I was five and standing outside on a fire escape. I was in the school yard punching a girl in the face because she called my Momma a dirty word. I was just learning why my mother named me Poesy.

I was learning that my mother was right, about a lot of things.

So I smiled. My mother snorted smoke from her nostrils, her grin shattered slow into pieces then turned into a frown. She opened her mouth to say something but the lights flickered and I felt hands. On my hand. On my shoulders. Weeping. Words in my head that needed to be written. I felt them, the dead, they came and they touched my cheek and they stroked my skin and they cried for me.

"You taught me real good, Mamma,? I assured her as I felt my skin chill. She pulled her shirt around her tighter and leaned back on the couch, the glitter of her dark eyes were turning slowly back to self-satisfied again. "You taught me everything I'd ever need to be a whore, just like you."

I never saw her get up off that couch so quick in my life before she hit me.

In my head I kept hearing this wailing. I still don't know if it was mine, hers, or all of the dead that stood behind me. She hit me again; her eyes looked like mud--dried and baked of all nourishment but the cracks of rage as she kept striking me, screaming at me. She kept hitting me, over and over again. All around me I could hear them whispering, telling me things, comforting me. So it didn't matter anymore. Nothing did.

I stood there and let her beat me. Because I felt I deserved it. Because everything my mother ever said about me and men had turned out true. Because I knew that little girls didn?t get to fly and women grew up to be canaries in cages. Because no one would ever love me the way they do in the stories, the books, and the novels told me they would. Because I?d believed all the lies. Because.

Happy sweet sixteen.

**House of Secrets lyrics, Otep

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-20 11:59 EST

AUGUST 2ND @ RED DRAGON INN

I know what you want
your magpies have come

If you know me so well then
Tell me which hand I use

Make them go
Make it go

Show me the things that I've been missin'
Show me the ways I forgot to be speaking
Show me the ways to get back to the garden

Show me the ways to get around the get around
Show me the ways to button up
Buttons That have forgotten they're buttons
Well we can't have that forgetting that**

This is supposed to be a vacation. I'm supposed to be running away from everything. You know--enjoying myself. To date I have spent most of my time holed up in my room with a bottle of rum and several note pads. I was about to ask for another bottle and I kept thinking if I stayed up in this room any longer I might not get the chance to see this fellow who penned this note and slid it under my door.

Okay, my first reaction to him was that he was an overbearing creep. He spent the first few hours being arrogant and pretty all at the same time; he's that man I wrote about... The kind that eats up rooms in his presence and spits them out because no one's good enough for his attention. I dislike him, a lot. He reminds me of the married, middle to upper class that would come to my mother with their lips curled in their suits--like they thought they were any better, but they forgot the important part: they were paying a whore to have sex with them. They weren't really any better than anyone else.

Except only I don't think this guy would ever do that. I don't know what his problem is yet. There's always a problem. Anything that good looking on his own without something drop dead gorgeous on his arm? Problem.

So anyway, he comes on strong the first meeting and then slips me this note. You should see the hand writing; the paper it is on. It's just as handsome--like he picked both of it because it best represented everything he was: crisp, clean, bold, strong, with fancy embellishments here and there. It made me angry at first. Who the hell did this guy think he was? What kind of a man goes out of his way when first meeting a chick to find out where she sleeps and shove a note under door thinking it's cute? I mean, I'm not Bella here--I don't find guys who stalk me and pretty much do everything in the book that deserves being jailed over, hot. This guy was not used to women telling him to fxck off.

So I should get out of bed and sober up and tell this jerk just how unimpressed I was. And then I wasn't angry anymore. I realized that really? He was pretty enough I just wanted an excuse to go down there and look at him a bit longer, even if he didn't look at me.

P.S. Men look at women all the time and women roll their eyes over it and write bitchy columns about it and freak out--let me be honest--unless they don't swing that way, women adore being looked at by men. They're picky about how, but when a man does it right? Without being a skeevy fxck, anyway...They love it. And they, we, do it right back all the time. But for some reason we like to pretend to get all affronted and say no, we totally weren't looking at your ass in those fine jeans, sir! How rude to say we were! And then go back to looking at your ass in those fine jeans.

He doesn't wear jeans. Pity for me--he was wearing leather, and that's even better (oh, god, could it be the weather? Hand me my leather--it's gonna be stuck in my head forever)

Anyway. Then I got mad at him for making me want to go look at him. So I showered and painted my face and did my hair and picked out semi-matching clothes, put lipstick on...all so I could come down the steps and furrow my brows at him. Find him and point out he was creepy.

And he was. Is. A little. There's something wrong about him. But I won't write that here because I think it's a secret I'm not supposed to know. Because I don't have any words for that, either, I've never seen it before. This whole place has things I've never seen before.

I guess the one constant is that there are plenty of dead, still. I'm not sure if that's actually a positive point but--he had a counter point to everything I had to say. It became less about looking at him and more about wanting to hit him repeatedly with the paper or pissing him off so he'd just leave me alone because I didn't want nor need a man to keep me rolling out of bed to come look at him. I don't need any connections here. I came here to get away from everything, not start something all over again.

I'm all...This man is a jerk.

He's the kind of jerk I like. And that's as dangerous as he is. I ended up walking out drunk with a bottle of mango rum. It's sitting empty on my dresser with the rest.

I should still be pissed, actually. But now all I'm worried about is if I said something bad enough to keep him away and if I should be apologizing now.

God, I swear I should have been a man. That way I could just stay in all day and play with myself without ever complicating things.

**Yes, Anastasia lyrics, by Tori Amos

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-21 12:23 EST

AUGUST 4TH, 3:07 AM, @ RED DRAGON INN ROOM

In the Bible only angels have wings
And the rest must wait to be saved
Amen
Pieces of us die everyday
As though our flesh were hell
Such injustice, as children we are told
That from God we fell.
Where are my angels?
Where's my golden one?
Where's my hope
now that my heroes have gone?
Some are being beaten
Some are being born.
And some can't tell the difference anymore
Amen
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I hear a lot of kids where I work go on about how life was so tough for them. Mum and daddy wouldn't let them borrow the keys to the Benz, so they ran away. Mum drinks a little too much and wouldn't buy them their favorite shirt, so they called child services on them. I hear how they 'grew up' early because they 'had to.' And I think about the time I grew up. When everything inside me changed. And I think about it and I wonder if I was ever young enough to have to grow up anyway. Or maybe I was never a kid.

Something changed in me when my mother hit me. I suppose I should have been bitter and angry, but I wasn't. I was just...finished. I was so ready to be finished with her and this, this apartment, being hungry, the school I went and the crack dealers under my window calling for the girls hookin' on the corner.

I was done with this. But I had no where to go.

I knew that my lip was split because wetting my lips hurt like a bxtch, my cheek hurt. Past that I didn't count the aches because I was some how still numb and waiting. The sun didn't care about what happened last night. It came flooding in the window facing the second hand, stained and worn pea green velvet couch I sat on, dressed. Debated going to school as I watched yellow rays hitting brick and rusted fire escape, lit up print smeared glass. I waited for my mother to roll out of her bed and start the screaming, which I was tired of, too. She didn't. I heard the flick of the zippo and her murmuring into the phone, either scoring herself a little something to make her day blur by or calling a John. I didn't care. I was waiting, desperately, for something to come to me. Some means for things to change.

I didn't cry either. I was tired of that, too.

So my mother sat in her room and I in mine and we both waited. I supposed she waited for something to come along she could drown herself in. I waited for me to come up with a way out of here. A way out.

The knock on the door startled me. None of the johns or the dealers knocked. They strolled their way in to our apartment via the front door just as they did in and out of my mothers bedroom half the time. The only people that knocked were maintenance or rent--and the former hadn't been by the building since...I don't remember.

"Poesy get the door," my mother said. She said it weird. She said it like there were wolves at it and she was in red hooded cape; or maybe she said it like women do when they give good-bye speeches and jump off cliffs. I tried to wipe the look of disbelief off my face before I got up, shuffled to the door and opened it.

"Yeah, whaddya wan--"

It's the officer that made me shut up first. Big white guy standing behind an African American woman in a tired suit. He looked like everything I'd ever read about the corn-fed south. Tall as hay stacks, wide as barns, and even--"Ma'am," was all he said, raking blue eyes over my bruised face and darting a look to the woman in tired skirt suit. She had a leather folder with paper work in it, in her other hand was a tape recorder.

"Poesy?" She asked gently. I knew what she was and who she was. I just did. She had that voice guidance counselors and doctors had when dealing with kids they thought might break; the voice that tries to mask the fact they're doing a job and they've said it before, seen it all before and were trying to care.

"Poesy O'Callaghan?" She was looking at my lip, my cheek, my eye, my wrist where my mothers fingerprints were purpling--she did it all in a single rake. She was that good. "I'd like to speak with you, if you wouldn't mind?" Her eyes went past me and inside, to my mother's open door. I didn't turn to see what she was looking at, for, or what she saw. All I heard from the bed room was overwhelming silence.

"Let's go some where, shall we?" Like there wasn't a six foot tall police officer looming behind her that wouldn't influence my answer. Well. It wouldn't--but had I been anyone else...

"Do you have a favori--" I didn't let her finish.

"I want to leave," I told her. "I don't want to go somewhere so you can interview me, yes, my mother did this, yes I want to leave this house. Now. Can we just go, now?"

"I--"

"I don't need anything from this place," flatly. "I just want to go. I need to go. Please--can we go?"

See, it was the dead silence behind me. Nothing. My mother--my own mother didn't even raise a stink about the fact someone was coming to take her own kid. I was sixteen and I thought it was the ultimate betrayal. If she loved me, if she really, really did love me? She'd of gotten out of that god damn foul bed, a bed she'd spent most of her adult life in, marched to that door and made some long speech like they did in the movies. About maybe not being perfect, but you know what? She loved her daughter. She loved her daughter and that you can't take her away because she'd finally seen the light--she was going to get clean. She was going to stop all this. She finally understood and knew it was gonna be tough but she could do it--for her baby! She could!

But my mother didn't say anything. She didn't even cry as far as I could hear.

The child protection services lady and police officer exchanged a look and that was it. "Alright, Posey. Let's go," was all she said, stepping aside and holding her arm out to indicate which way to go. As if I were struck brain dead the moment I crossed the door and wouldn't know how to leave my own filth. I hated my mother then. I hated her so much and it wasn't the sort of hate that came with having to clean up your own toys and eat broccoli. I hated her. As I stepped through the doorway and into the hall I hoped to never see her again. I hoped that she'd die. I hoped awful, spiteful, disgusting things for her.

I walked and I did not look back to see if the officer or woman were following.

See, the thing is--children are children. They think they see everything but they never do.

I spent all my life shoving this particular memory under a rock. When my mother kept finding me to ask for money, a place to stay, some booze, when she meandered into the library I worked at drunk out of her mind to check up on me and ended up throwing up in my waste basket--I never remembered this day. I wanted with all my heart to forget this, forget her, pretend she didn't exist. I changed my last name and I moved all over New York trying to outrun my past.

But when my mother died it all came rushing back. Especially and always this one.

It's when I hung up the phone from being notified they'd found her body beaten to death in an alley by her latest pimp, that I remembered.

My mother hadn't phoned for a john or a fix that morning. My mother had phoned child services. Her last, sober and coherent gift to me was calling child services.

My mother was broken. She didn't know how to do anything the right way. So in her own way, my mother had finally fought for me by giving up.

**Amen lyrics, by Jewel

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-22 13:55 EST

AUGUST 7TH, 4:45 AM @ RED DRAGON INN ROOM

There is Hope in the words
of my poems, your words
shared with me, my fingers on the keyboard
flowing from them onto the screen, the page
Faith in my walk in the world
in the knowledge of you, your presence
Your abundant Grace
Love in my heart because of the ways
You touch my life
giving me a family, a household of faith
to share my days
Together faith, hope and love
They are a force to mend the world**

I'd heard horror stories about foster care, especially for older kids. Where I lived, we'd all heard it. Sometimes child services would rush in and take someone's kid when there wasn't any need too. They just did because no one believed that people could be that poor, happy and good at the same time. Then there were kids like me--I'd lie. I lied about my mother and lied about my home and lied so much that it became second nature. I could spin a story like you wouldn't believe, about how my mother was this and that and just so free spirited.

When they took me, they took me to McDonald's anyway. The woman in the suit started the tape recorder and started asking me questions in her gentle-voice. She talked to me as if I were a deer ready to run at any moment. I answered every question with the truth; no more lies. I told her everything in a far-far-away tone that kept me sane. (But was I? Was I ever?)

They took me to a place with other kids. Cleaned me up, made me shower. Picked my head with toothpicks to check for lice and shoved me in a doctor?s office. They tried to be caring but there are so many kids in the system. There always are. I was a number here to be processed and I didn't have much hope.

No one wanted a half-grown up whore-daughter to foster. They weren't as cute as babies.

I had a clean cot and a space to myself. I kept to it, I listened to the whispering of dead people and had no paper to write. I went to a different school for a while and barely made it through. I don't remember what school it was, or the other kids or where. For six months my entire memory became one long, blurred walk down a hallway to an office. Except I didn't know which office it was or why I was going.

One morning in winter the woman who had taken me from my mother stood in the doorway to the room I shared with other girls that came in and out like rotating doors. She smiled. She seemed happy and I didn't ask why. It didn't matter, she told me.

"Poesy, we've got some great news..." She said something about some family farm. Somewhere upscale New York like I should be impressed. She babbled on and on about how wonderful it was going to be and things were going to look up, and blah blah blah. I had no inclination to listen or to care. I didn't care about anything, I was so far down into myself I was not there. I could walk, talk, pick up my book bag and my gym bag full of donated clothes and went with her. We got into her minivan and she drove.

She talked the whole way. The city relented to smaller towns. Smaller towns relented to highway, highway relented to farmland. But the drive was hours long and the day was just started to fade when I had the overwhelming urge to ask her...What? Are we going to Narnia or something?

"Here we go, almost there!" cheerfully. All I saw was a wooden gate pulled up and a dirt road near a paved. She drove me down the dirt road for what seemed like six more hours. The first bit was nothing but forest and trees before acres and acres of flat, fat and happy farm land assaulted me where ever I looked. The sun had gone, leaving the world washed in medium blue right before the start shine and moon. In the middle of all of this farmland, down the forever road that I thought would never end was a house made of rock.

Seriously. Rock. Old cobblestone with tiny windows that apparently walked out of the Troubadour period. The woman stopped the minivan and cheerfully rolled out, pulling me with her. I shuffled along to gape at the longest front porch I had ever seen. A bright red barn that belonged in a Normal Rockwell painting. I could hear chickens and smell hay and clean horses. Everywhere: flowers. Planted around the house and in planters on the windows and hanging. I didn't know their names.

She took me by my hand to lead me to the door.

When it opened it was a fairytale of light and sound. Straight into the kitchen, white-washed and the American dream--a big table in the middle of it. There standing by a man in plaid shirt was a woman with silver hair. She had silver glasses as if she matched them perfectly. Her hand was on his shoulder and she was saying something with humor dancing in her eyes. He was older, too. Wrinkles by his eyes and skin like caramel. His hands had big, work worn farmer's knuckles and there were children....

One girl in a wheelchair being fed by a boy that rocked; a wide-eyed blond girl that said nothing but grinned. She was sticks and stones and eating with her wrists together oddly, like there was something still tied there but there wasn't. There was a boy who didn't look anyone in the eye who hummed and ate his food and...

"This must be Poesy," the woman with silver hair said. When she smiled she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. "Everyone, welcome Poesy to her new home."

And they all looked up at me and I felt so wound tight that something was snapping.

I just crumpled right there to the floor and sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed. On her beautiful, tiled kitchen floor that was cool to the touch. I could hear the sound of my own sobs thrown back at me. There were chairs scraping all over the place, alarm raced over head.

"Get her some water, quick, Miribelle, that's a dove--Joshua, don't just stand there, a blanket. Tinsy, why don't you get her a plate of the pie--"

There were hands on my hair. On my shoulders. On my back. They weren't the hands of dead people who came when no one else would. They were real people. Real people with real hands that seemed to really care. I lost my breath, my nose plugged, my eyes felt swollen and crusted. I sobbed and sobbed and could not stop. They brought me up with elbows and murmured things. Nice things. Sweet things I didn't know about until then. They took me to the table and set me down, someone put a blanket around my shoulders and someone set water in front of me.

"Nathan, darlin, don't crowd. She's not used to you yet--" I could hear. And they had all gathered around me with big, wide eyes. They were frightened.

Not of me. But for me.

And I tried to tell them it wasn't their fault. I tried to smile and take the water and a bite of pie but I was sobbing so hard all I did was begin choking on both of them.

"It's alright," they said. "It's okay, Poesy. No one's going to hurt you anymore. You're home." They said.

You're home.

And I smiled at them while I cried out all my heart.

**Poem by Raymond A. Foss

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-23 16:07 EST

AUGUST 9TH, 6:22 AM @ RED DRAGON INN ROOM

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay

His name was Mike Peterson, she was Peggy Peterson. They'd been married for thirty years. They liked to tell all us kids they'd married early, young and foolish. That it had been a long, hard trip for them but good work and honest days had lead them to where they were now.

On a 55 acre farm in a farm house as old as the land (so it seemed) with seven foster kids. Foster kids the system deemed too 'tough' or too mentally and physically challenging to make it in other foster homes. In some ways I understood why they put me here. These people were fantastically, amazingly good people. I was too old to be easily placed anywhere else and it was a means of showing me that there were people out there who weren't completely fxcked up.

Oh, don't get me wrong--Mike and Peggy, the kids, we all fought from time to time. There were arguments and sensitive things we all had to work through. The little blond girl who ate her food oddly, holding her wrists together was Charlotte. Charlotte had been taken when she was seven from her mother. Charlotte's mother had kept her foot-and-wrist tied in a closet, they estimate, probably around two or three--whenever Charlotte began to learn to walk. All the time. Before coming to the Peterson's, all Charlotte had known was a closet and ropes. She ate with her hands together, played with her hands together; she couldn't talk either--but there was a gleam of knowing in her eyes that always convinced me she knew what was being said to her.

Charlotte got frightened of so many things all the time. I tried to imagine what it was like in her head when I watched the Peterson's, everyday, try and convince her it was okay to leave the house. I tried to imagine the sky and what it'd be like had I never known it. They had to do this everyday to convince her to come out and play. And everyday, Charlotte looked at the sky like terrified children would love dragons.

Every time I am frightened, I try to remember Charlotte and her sky.

Nathan had Cerebral Palsy; the Peterson's had rebuilt part of the downstairs to accommodate him and earlier that year finalized adoption papers. Nathan was officially theirs.

Joshua had Turrets and seemed as good humored about it as he could be. He made it a point to tell me it was alright to giggle, he didn't mind it anymore. He was good. Nearly eighteen and healthy, he was the only kid that could yell 'shxt dxck nxpples' during the Thanksgiving prayer and get away with it. (I will never forget that as long as I live and will still grin inappropriately every Thanksgiving.)

All of them were here because no one else but the Petersons' would take them.

I tried to trust them. I did. I was part of that family and they taught me so many things. I learned to cook. Not Kraft macaroni and cheese cook, but real food. I ate things from the ground in the winter I'd planted in spring. I learned to till soil and shovel hay and the other part of shoveling that wasn't as pleasant but had to be done. I learned to milk a cow and let me tell you, you don't realize how hilarious that can be.

I went to a new school where no one knew me. But I kept to myself. I'd learned a lesson early and I couldn't forget it.

I learned to love the Petersons in the way shy people write poetry for those they love. If they asked me to do something, no matter how much I hated it? I did it. If they wanted me to go somewhere, I went. If they needed a night to themselves I'd watch the younger kids and Joshua would care for Nathan. I would have done anything for them, but quietly. Peggy tried to connect with me and I wished so hard I could have connected back. I wished I could have said, 'I love you,' everyday to her...She was, after all, everything I'd ever dreamed about as a child. But I was afraid that if I told them they'd no longer be there. Some how, some way, I would taint this beautiful thing I had by just being me. So I showed them the best way I knew how.

I wrote them poems and chapters. I printed them and framed them. She stitched some of the smaller ones and hung them on the wall. Peggy understood then, I think, how to connect with me.

She left me notes in my lunch box and letters. She'd get up earlier than everyone else and drive all the way down to the mailbox just to write me a letter. It seemed so ridiculously awesome and still does.

But I kept waiting for the shoe to drop with them; I kept waiting for the disaster that would come.

What's that line? "Nothing gold can stay." That's what I thought. They were too perfect. I was too perfect, everything too perfect. Something had to give.

And, eventually, something would.

**Poem by Robert Frost

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-08-31 09:24 EST

AUGUST 26th, 3:33 AM @ RED DRAGON INN ROOM

Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.**

He's insane.

He says things like, "Roses can bloom in cement," and other pretty things just to see if he can break me, I think. He tied his tie around my head while I was almost too drunk to see. I could have cried from the ridiculousness of it.

I spent some time a while back, first I guess I should say--in his company inside the coffee shop. He likes Neruda and can speak the poems in Spanish. He likes literary classics and leather or suits. He likes to remind me I am beautiful.

I haven't been here more than a month and have someone quote me Neruda in Spanish while telling me I am beautiful. This is the way modern Greek tragedies start, with promises and good intentions but then you wake up and its a road to hell.

God I...I want to believe. More than anything. I do. But I know who I am. I know where I came from. I know my bluebird is buried deep.

Roses growing in pavement. Shxt. Everyone knows those are the kind that die the fastest.

**In the Storm of Roses, by Ingeborg Bachmann

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-09-03 10:31 EST

SEPTEMBER 2ND, 8:49 PM @ MARKET PLACE

Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,**

EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON
Starting her day off the right way, with orange juice and alcohol. Breakfast of champions, several slogans whirled around her head as her fingers wrapped around the glass to set it on the folded napkin. She leaned a bit to let her mind wonder out over the empty room. Still couldn't understand how the Red Dragon made money--how they didn't get the house cleaned out and stolen; sure, there's a guy, some big mafia looking dude always at the front door but he didn't seem to do much. Poesy took her drink finally and downed a mouthful. The citrus tart of the orange puckering her mouth--"Once upon a time," she said without looking at Tin-Man, the silver haired, caramel skinned man she was sure would become a personal devil of hers.

Something about the intensity, the way he looked at her made her fall silent, made her look away again. Then her eyes moved left to right quickly, she wasn't seeing the chairs or tables, she was trying to see the words in her head and how best to continue. She struggled with some bit of truth: the first chapter was always the hardest.

His eyes flicked downwards as he started to fill the glass with scotch. And because he can, because he is? "There was a beautiful young woman." It's not that he wants to make her uncomfortable, no - but he does want to make sure that this story goes in a direction it should, even if it's not the direction she thinks it should go in.

She shook her head at him: No. That wasn't ...that hadn't been the story she meant to tell him at all. His added notes had made the thing she had wished to tell him, this piece of her history that wasn't really about her, veer off the tracks entirely. His wasn't the right sentence at all. She tried again:

"Once upon a time?There was a woman who lived in a little box. At first it wasn't her fault for living in it, her parents didn't care about her enough to help her get out of it. But as time went on, that little girl decided that the box was going to have to be good enough. That it was all she'd ever have. So she learned to live in it.

?She learned to love and hate the walls. She adjusted; her mind began to form little boxes in her head. She stopped trying to look outside of all them; she missed the changing sky, the birds that flew overhead. She missed the moon and the sun and the stars, because she was so busy telling herself that this box was all there was." Poesy took another drink of her screwdriver and set it aside. She turned on the stool and put her elbow on the bar, chin on her hand.

"And soon, because the woman believes that was all there was, it was so. She stopped dreaming about the sky. The birds. She stopped seeking outside and began to live within the confines of the box."

She counted the bottles behind the bar. She looked at their labels. Anything to keep herself from looking at him, because she felt like no one deserved her eyes at that moment. No one.

"She lived like this for a long time and life within that little box was very cruel. It was not kind. It did not give sunshine or fairytales as a reward for those who lived within it. And then one day, that woman had a little girl." Poesy took her finger and drew a random letter in the condensation of her glass nearby.

?That little girl was something outside of that box she'd built. Something different. She didn't know how to teach that little girl how to look for the sky or the birds or the sun. But she knew that maybe, that little girl didn't deserve to live in the same box. So she said, 'I will name her Poesy. I will name her after poetry so that she will never be confined to hearing things the same way I do.' And for once, the woman thought outside of the box she'd built. She would not do it again for a long time."

Poesy used her other hand to lift the orange juice and then lower it. The fire crackles, a log falls, sending spray of sparks upward. Someone in the kitchen washes dishes.

"The end," abruptly offered in the stretching silence all her words made.

***

I told him a story. I told him the beginning of my story. I probably shouldn't. No one likes the beginning; it's always awkward and dirty.

I hid a truth about myself in a Once upon a time. I think it backfired. I think because I didn't know what to say when he wanted me to say something... I don't understand why I have to keep opening my mouth.

Luckily there was that chick with a book--Told me her name was Riley--and another girl, Duci, that came and saved me from running. Good god, Duci is possibly the sweetest thing on two legs. I didn't even think it was possible for anyone to be that sweet and live here at the same time.

I couldn't stay. I felt like an awkward insider with two best buds. I meandered all over the market place, drunk, and did actually buy something.

Too bad it wasn't something preventative to keep me from putting my foot in my mouth.

** Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon poem snippet by Pablo Neruda, portion about asterisk taken from live play, with thanks going out to Thy Fearful Symmetry, an amazing role player.

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-09-09 11:25 EST

So needy of comfort but too raw to be embraced,
undo this privacy and put me in my place.
A generous palm stroke, the hugest of hugs,
undo this privacy, embrace
embrace me, embrace me
embrace

I am strong in his hands, I am above me.
On my own I am human and I do faults.
She is strong in his hands, she is beyond her,
on her own she is human and she does faults.
She is strong in his hands.
She is strong in his hands.
She is strong in his hands.**

I think it's easier to be a coward for some of us.

It's pre-wired into us. We lament and we moan and we p*ss away our time writing bad poetry and wallowing in the mistakes we made, because it's far easier to say 'wooooeee is meeee,' than do anything about our own situations. It's easier to sit down in the middle of the road during the great big race of life and cry about losing before you get to the finish line because--well why not? Getting to the finish line is so much effort. It's sweat; muscle work and leg work and pushing yourself and why? You're just gonna lose anyway. Everyone else has gotten there before you. Let's just wait for someone else to pick us up and then convince ourselves we were never going to win anyway.

It's easier to be a coward.

I'm a coward.

It's easier for me not to fight. To let things go. Let it slip on by. Someone better will come along, I think. Someone who understands the right way to do things, I tell myself.

I haven't seen him for seven days. A week. I have purposefully avoided him. I have left my room and tip-toed down the halls, then looked left and right to make sure he wasn't anywhere about. I have spent time on the balcony looking down to ensure that I would not see silver hair and then I've slipped out and thrown myself into the meandering crowds of this place.

I thought this would make me happy. I thought that the fact there's no one to call me home; no one but bill collectors and rent-over-due messages to connect me to my past would make me happy. I thought that maybe losing myself here would make me happy.

I thought that avoiding him and not saying the one thing I wanted to--but was afraid too, because I am scared to death of ruining this somehow....Would make me happy. I thought that avoiding him would make me happy.

I wanted to ask him if he needed me, I think. I don't know if anyone's ever needed me for anything. Not really. I don't know if I am brave enough to take on that responsibility.

Jesus Christ--I don't know. And why him, of all people? I guess we're just a twisted sort of fairytale. Or I have a thing for unrequited romances.

He's fxcking amazing in leather though. Gotta say. I--Holy Balls, Poesy. It's only been a coupla months and you're all ready to follow him around the halls with your books as a shield, giggling behind locker doors.

Good grief girlfriend. Get a grip.

**A Generous palm stroke lyrics, by Bjork

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-09-13 14:33 EST

SEPTEMBER 12th, 2:45 am @ I DON'T FXCKING KNOW?

Who in Spring can bear to grieve alone?
Who, sober, look on sights like these?
Riches and Poverty, long or short life,
By the Maker of Things are portioned and disposed;
But a cup of wine levels life and death
And a thousand things obstinately hard to prove.
When I am drunk, I lose Heaven and Earth,
Motionless?I cleave to my lonely bed.
At last I forget that I exist at all,
And at that moment my joy is great indeed.**

I adm so I am so drunkright drunk right now I don't even--

Lol, he says, he doesnt want me to avoid him anymore okay and then

then I act like a whore.

I'mnot

I'm not a whore.

I'm not.

I'm not my mother. I'm not.

**Poetry of Li Po

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2010-11-30 21:57 EST

NOVEMBER 15th, 11;32 PM 2010, SOME BAR IN A PLACE CALLED WEST END? I THINK.

Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterward remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.***

Have you ever lived in a city? It sticks to you. It weaves itself into your bones until they become the shelled out remains of the steel beams of half-finished buildings jutting into the sky. I think living in a city makes you tougher than most people, especially if you end up being born poor. It stays with you with everything you do, haunts every transaction, every touch, every waking moment of your life.

You can get out of being poor, sometimes, if you make the right choices. Yes, staying in school, getting a job, working hard. That'll take you out of dirt-poor and make you almost dirt-poor, able to afford a dinky apartment so small if you fart side-ways your next door neighbor hears it and yells at you to shut the fxck up already, its four am do you know what time it is?

I stayed in school. I got a job. I wanted to move out on my own back into the city to be near university when I was seventeen but my mother kept trying to ruin my life and, much to the frustration of Peggy, whom I never did call Peggy and ended up calling her mum. (And to this day there are very few words I find as beautiful and sacred and secret as Mum. When I talk to her, I always make sure I say Mum. Not Peggy. Never Peggy. She was Mum.) So I didn't move out and come back to the city, my steel backbone, until I was nineteen.

The apartment was pretty bad. I didn't have a lot of cockroaches but I kept seeing them every once in a while by chance. When I stumbled out of bed at four am to go to the bathroom or came home late and snapped the light on. One or two would be sitting in the middle of my linoleum kitchen floor and freeze like they were as horrified by me as I was them. And...they probably were, but anyway?

I was standing in front of my living room window. I only had two, one in the bedroom and one in the living room and they weren't huge. But they were mine and I could see out over the city what seemed like forever. It was a fantastic, amazing view for such a shxtty, rundown apartment that I was juggling two jobs and school for...But you know what? They were my windows. For a little bit, anyway.

It was in December Peter called me, and I was, as I said, standing in front of my window.

The smog in the air was thick. It washed an already grey New York day even grayer than usual, smoke stacks and lightning rods, buildings that tore the sky, little winking lights and towers reminded me of huddled kids on cold days. It was snowing only a little bit. A flutter of occasional tiny white dots crossed my reflection holding the phone to my ear as I listened to Peter.

Peter didn't ever call me.

It wasn't that he didn't care because I know Peter did. Peter was one of those men raised in the trout-fishing-wear-a-lumberjack-shirt-boots-wrangl e a horse with your bare hands sort of manly men ways I only read about in magazines when I was a kid. Peter didn't cry. He didn't know how to sew. He got this awkward look on his face when any of the girls remotely mentioned 'girl troubles' and literally ran out of the room to go anywhere else but where we were discussing it. He went to pieces whenever any of us or Peggy cried, doing those strange, hesitant man-pats and around the shoulder hugs while his eyes reflected panic that he couldn't make everything better.

And besides that, Peter just knew I couldn't trust men.

He never pushed me. Ever. He never cornered me to ask why I would never go near him or stay too long in a room with him when he was the only one in it, but he didn't ignore me either. He learned how to put himself just in the corner of my eye. He was like...He was like one of those tall, thick roman supports in the ruined temple of men I had in my head. He was strong, he was quiet and he was always there for me even when I didn't want him to be.

I learned to love him, quietly, the way he did everything around me just as quietly. He didn't call or write like Peggy did, but when I was on the phone I could hear him rumbling questions to Peggy: How is she doing? How's school? Is she okay where she is? Is she eating enough? How are the boys treating her? Is she safe? She hasn't had that woman contact her, has she? Is she warm? Does she have enough? and I could sometimes hear his questions in Peggy's handwriting in her letters.

So when he called me in December, as I picked up the phone and put it to me ear to hear his voice?my heart plunged into winter.

"Poesy?"

And I couldn't think of what to say. Usually you're supposed to say 'hi!' or 'hello?' or 'sup' or something in return and all I could do is stare at my reflection, frozen and wide-eyed.

We didn't really talk much, in my last year before moving out, about Peggy's cough. Peggy's cough had always sort of been there. Worse in winter than it was in the summer or spring. In the spring everyone, including her, chalked it up to allergies. In the winter, the kids bringing home germs. Peggy always had some pretty nasty colds in the winter that'd settle deep in her lungs.

Until that last year when things started piling up. Peggy losing weight despite having the same healthy appetite she always had. Peggy started to look frail and tired, her wheezing when she pushed herself too much. She'd complain that licking her own lips was like sticking her tongue in the salt shaker. Peter spent most of the winter pushing Peggy to go see a different doctor than old doctor Martin, who was pushing sixty and had been Peggy's doctor all her life. Mum didn't want to go to a different doctor. She thought it was just a really bad cold.

It wasn't. It wasn't a cold.

I didn't really understand entirely what all Peggy had written to me last year about Cystic Fibrosis. She told me about the sweat test and the prognosis. She talked a lot about how lucky she was to go that long without knowing, how some younger kids diagnosed with it are now outliving 18? And that was, apparently fantastic. She wrote long, meandering letters about the other kids and how proud of me she was and things were great, really great, and just fantastic and everything was fine. Really fine.

But I kept reading through the lines. She'd stopped writing about her gardens and her petunias and the corn and the little things she loved doing. The cross stitches, the sewing, Peter's ridiculous habits that drove her nuts. All of her writing became generic phrases, bits about the weather and books she'd read or how fine she was doing. Really fine. Just fine. Everything's fine.

It wasn't fine.

There's something wrong with humans. We're pre-set to believe a lie more readily than the truth if it means we can stay happy just a little bit longer.

I wanted to be happy. I wanted her to be healthy. I wanted to keep her forever because I never had a mother like that and it wasn't fxcking fair to lose her this soon.

So when I heard Peter's tired, gravely hello? on the other end I wanted to hang up. I wanted to close my ears like I could close my eyes and pretend I couldn't hear.

"Hey," I croaked.
"Hey, you. Listen..." And there was at least two minutes of silence where I could hear him swallowing and just breathing. In and out. Tick tock. Gathering himself to say what he thought needed to be said to me that I already knew but didn't want to know and oh god please, no, please...Don't?

"Peggy would really like to see you, Poesy. She's not...They've done all they can, they've really been?they've been good to her. Great. But there's not much else we can do. She's on the list but they don't think they'll get her in time so..." His voice pinched off in an exhale.

I put my hand on the window and watched the condensation form around each fingertip. I wanted the cold. I wanted to be cold, so I let my insides be covered in smog-dirtied snow.

"But they said?"
"Poesy." Just my name. But that's all that was needed. He said it in such a low, calm, strong way that it was like ice water over my head or a small shake when I was about to faint.
"Alright," I breathed into the phone. I didn't have the strength to say anything else.

"I'll wire you the money for a ticket here."
"But I?"
"It should be there tomorrow morning. Try to get packed and out here by then, too. Poesy, please. Okay?"

I swallowed. All that was in my throat was the dust of tears that wouldn't come.

"Okay," I said, and didn't even hang up to go pack. I let the phone clatter to the floor.

For all those with Cystic Fibrosis, for all those who have been lost. My heart is with you.

Please consider donating toward ending Cystic Fibrosis today. Visit the Cystic Fibrosis donation page here: CF Foundation Make a Donation Page

***Remember, a poem by Christina Rossetti

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2011-02-18 00:54 EST

FEBRUARY 14th, SOME DIVE BAR CALLED THE OAK N' GRIND

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues. *

As a writer, tragedy drives us. Don't believe the things they tell you in school about where to dot your i's or where to cross your t's or how to make a sentence correctly or proper. Don't listen to the droning of people who tell you poetry doesn't flow unless it rhymes and good poetry much be written by people who have thrown thousands of dollars down a tube to learn about rules they'll never use.

It's all bullshxt.

All a writer needs is a good editor and enough tragedy to be understood. The tragedy of love, of children, or starving, of heart break, living?the tragedy of being a human being. Once they have that, as long as they can make themselves understood there are a million souls out there with the same tragedy as they. There's someone out there waiting to cry, to bleed, to die with the writer and that's all you need.

My tragedy is strung along carefully through the open fingers of some malevolent being who thought that it shouldn't be necessary for me to have everything okay all of the time. Ooops, I imagine it would say in passing one day, looking down to my life going well with much bemusement and humor. Can't have that now, can we? Let's make this worse some how.

My tragedy is in the white walls of a hospital. I fxcking hate white walls. For as long as I live I believe I will do anything to not have a single white wall in any room or any home or apartment I might ever own.

She looked so small. Peggy looked so small. So tired. A tube up her nose and machines that beeped, blooped, clicked, whirred, hummed in a soft tone?violins about to play the crescendo of horror music, I thought. I stood in the doorway for the longest time, horrified. A coward in the face of Peggy's demise to this disease. Selfish that it had to hit me and my family. That it had to take her away from me. That it made me come here and face this.

Peggy's kids...Other foster children that she'd taken in over the years? They'd filled one waiting room and then the other. All of them stared at me blankly as I passed to linger like ghosts in her doorway. I considered bolting before she or Peter, head bent over Peggy's hand that he held, noticed me.

Peggy's glassy eyes above the dark, brown splotched circles under them opened. Peter raised his head.

Peggy smiled and I died a little with the woman she used to be. Her shoulders jerked, her rib cage, delicate as the brass ornate cages for canaries or finches battered itself under her hospital gown in desperate draw for breath.

How long does she have? I'd asked into the silence of the call from the airport.
Peter's silence went on for so long I thought I was going to scream.
Not long. Was all he managed before hanging up.

I looked at Peggy as she smiled, stepped forward and came to her bedside and all I wanted to say was Not long. instead of 'hello' and I'd no idea why. Why, in the face of all this, panic and madness rooted deep within my despair.

"Hey," I croaked. A splitting image of the opening line I had given to Peter what felt like years away, thousands of miles.

Peggy's hand in mine was a child's, small and delicate. But it wasn't me who cried. It was Peter. Behind us as Peggy gasped and I murmured, his hushed, wet sobbing was what I imagined what losing all hope sounded like.

Clenched Soul, poem by Pablo Neruda

A Flawed Verse · Date: 2013-06-13 06:34 EST

You,

I look for myself between the blank pages of this book you have given me. I look for myself and realize that perhaps I have never really been here at all. I have been nothing more than a shell of a young girl in the shadow of my mother using one substance to the next to make everything too sharp to handle a blurred edge.

I wish I was sorry for what I am right now. But I'm not. I'm not sorry. I am only sorry that I do not understand the words you wrote to me in this book.

One whole year of drinking around the world and I haven't found the answer at all: who were we?

--Your little blackbird at your eyes,
Poesy

Topic: There's a blue bird in my heart

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