Some days are full of too much hope
while being jailed
within your old stories.

Don’t tell me I’m being brave by going on.
I have no choice-
I'm a mother.

Back home,
The Valley:
my tuner was busted,
my calibration was off,
life busted with grief,
off the walls
with loss...

So I took him with me,
believing he would
be able to gather sunshine
from golden California hills,
renew his life in Pacific waves,

but only his sister could move him.

As for me; he'd decided
somewhere (either on the plane
or on the ground) that
I was not to be trusted.

I sat next to him on the jet, asking, “What….What?”
but he didn’t answer, just turned his tears
towards clouds.

Would he not be moved by the Grand Canyon?

In the arms of Giant Redwoods I thought
he might find solace.
In wine country we would walk amongst deer.

But on the way home
I was imagining the plane crashing.
[It was three days before the towers
and when i got home, i said to Gary, that it felt like
the Judgement Day.]

Thoughts of others pull me now,
away from this writing,
but my grief is a pack
of wolves on leashes,
I can't go far, before
reality yanks me in hard
and I return
to constriction of
a love so strong
and a heart so broken,
that it should (but never does)
lead to submission.


It’s not that I mind his tears, as much
as his silences,
eclipsing joy and hope in my heart.

Someone was having a bad dream that spilled into his
life, that’s all.

He wants me out of his head.

I assume others are like me.

I was walking the other way, refusing to feed the
nightmare. He couldn't understand.

My sin (and I know this to be true )
is that I got under his skin.
“How do you know what I’m thinking
before I know it?”
he’d asked long before his war.

I’m a mother, that’s all.

Do disconnect the wiring.

Nothing short of violence could make me stop coddling
Stop
worrying
Stop
trying to be his goddamn manager.

It was common knowledge that a mother should never
try to be her children's psychiatrist or therapist.
I was both.


I am sick now from being the martyr.

I actually am a happy person
but underneath I would rather it were he.

Grief keeps surfacing, muddying
the ground of my life;
my emotional fatigue masks
a spiritual desire
to be in Reality, not this world.

We must step out of blame,
step into the present,
emerge from childhood, a place
I’d been stuck until i broke open,
me the youngest in the family
with the biggest mouth.

I used to be afraid to cry because I thought
if I started that I would never stop.

But I cried my heart out
and now it’s not a flood
just a frequently leaking faucet.


II.

I’d learned to live without men.

I’m a writer. I’m an artist. My mind is circular.

I’m a heart beating, in spite of a mind.

I’m naturally endangered,
I’m me. Don’t you get it?
Me with my prophetic dreams
and visitations from spirits.
Me who hears the words before they are spoken.
my mind is circular.
I am a woman.
I am full of round places.
That is the layout of my brain’s terrain.

What is yours and what will heal its pain?

III.

He was gonezo, zonked,
he went bonkers, completely,
mentally berserk

something in the head that you can hear, tells you
ain't getting away with living as others do.

From where does the Dibbuk come
who possesses the mind of a mere child
on his or her way into the world,
who grabs the keys to the world
and says, no,
not you, you can not do
as others do.
You shall not be free.
You come with me.

I did my 30 years in that mental jail.
I know what it’s like to blame the parents.
I got a lot of mileage out of it.
It only prolonged my sentence, however.

Acceptance. Surrender.

After the peyote
and all those meds
he forgot
it was just a dream

Strike it from the record, it wasn’t real
he was not acting from who he really is.

I know what it is to feel sentenced to not live one’s
potential life.

Acceptance. Surrender.

It’s such an irony that surrender to facing our mental
ills, leads to mental health.


IV.

There is gold light behind his leaden tears.
We only hurt before we cry,

If I stick with my pain I’ll see the larger pattern.
being nobody,
there's safety in that.