Praise Song

I didn't sign up for that training course in spiritual awakening

Didn't watch Youtube clips on multiple personalities, schizophrenia 

or the ways that a person could enter their trauma only to fade away

I had misplaced the calculator

couldn't add up the disappearing acts

the hours of "meditation"

the way you'd close your eyes, but never seemed to rest

Your eyelids fluttering like caged birds caught 

Some epic battle playing out inside your mind

My eyes strained in vigilance at every one of your fading movements

The screams I laid out against chaos, delusions

defending ghosts that weren't even there

I started to really grind my teeth then

My bottom jaw chiseling a slow slant in the direction 

of a side of me I couldn't make sense of

The planets we lived on only collided like thunder in a downpour

The rest of the time,

I lived here like you weren't even there.

I listened, even when you called yourself Jesus

I watched when you stopped coming upstairs

2 weeks

Pushed hard against the basement door pounding

My eyes adjusting to the darkness just so I could SEE

Until that day I couldn't push hard enough for it to open

The force of each strike, 

a reminder that I had banished myself into 

some other place in my body so I couldn't feel

Propelled by the immediacy of fear,

thrown into the arms of action and then defeat

Each decent down

I resigned myself to what I might find of you

Told myself I didn't even care

The tears that ran down my face

hot and alien on my skin

Each part of me uncontrollably shaking

like the time I stepped out into a blizzard in the middle of January,

wearing only a t-shirt and my bare feet

Besides the numb panic,

The only identifiable feeling 

the heat rising up inside of me 

pouring over me, overtaking me

I called for help a second time.

Some animal part of me

the beaver 

the fox of me 

that knew you had to have sticks and mud

build a damn for protection

Instinct, the mechanism of our earthly survival

This time they came with a heroine at their side:

two in fact.

With some reptilian authority, I banished the vultures 

that smelled your demise and cleared a safe passage through the exterior doorway

into the goddamn light

When you finally walked into the sunlight

greasing your jaw with much-needed moisture

I watched the ash of your skin vaporize into ether

The bones in your clothes felled me

Truth is the blunt instrument that knocks you to your senses

and brings you to your fucking knees.

I used shame and guilt to build me yet another suit of my body

to carry the ways I couldn't really save any of us

from the demons that hunger for our pain

I needed a place for the beaver,

the fox

to tend to my heartbreak,

your healing, the long work through the winter

I spent 2 years, more like these 3

casting small spells

feet on the ground

feet in the pond

remembering the words 

Slowly,

I've been reclaiming the parts 

left out in that cold January

barricaded in the basement

hiding in the grey of loneliness and misunderstanding

These parts, the soft fur,

the quick beating heart of my animal body

are slowly 

coming 

back home 

to me.

Dust Bunny

Dust Bunny

Our first kiss in your kitchen

happened as fast as a flash flood 

sweeping debris out of my gutters

long filled with the decay of anger, loneliness, frustration

Time stood still then, the kitchen 

sparkled with a brightness I don't think it had seen in years

the refrigerator shiny and ordered, the shelves of

vibrant colored chachkies dancing 

in the delight of us

the music from your iPod calling out the steps 

to our newly learned dance

Love is funny

I forgave the lurking stares of dust bunnies

growing in size like monsters living

in the corners of your bedroom calling 

out my name each Sunday

demanding to be tended to or

at least, to be seen

In your bedroom

the boundaries between upholstered boucle bed edges

and maroon shag carpet pebbled with piles of collected graphic ts

stepping stones across the great distance 

an homage to the ways we lose 

ourselves to excess

hoping to fill the gaping hole left by panic, isolation, and need

Your art collection collected 

the cobwebs of your wrongful neglect

each piece suffered

dingy and sad

I imagined sneaking in when you had left the building

like some arch-angel bestowing 

goodness and light

clearing out the webbing, appeasing the hungry shadows

feasting on greasy splatters on the kitchen floor

I never could bring myself to enter unannounced 

playing the part of cleaning lady to your sadness

even though you had given me a key

so absent-mindedly, or maybe already sure

that this was the kind of love worth unlocking the front door for

only one Christmas

I snuck in to leave you a tiny tree 

decorated hastily with lights and a star

to brighten the absence of living 

your reaction to that small, secret token 

unsure of the reception to it

the cost of the bigness of love's demanding throes

was an angry tantrum of misunderstanding

small gestures of loving are not 

the love language you speak

you wanted bottle rockets and wheelies in the parking lots

of all the empty places around town 

I

had just come through the longest storm of the century

looking

for the refuge of holidays spent 

together

for once in my life

I only realized years later 

no gesture would have been large enough to fill

those holes we needed to fill

by loving ourselves first, fully