29/30 lord just get me through this

You turned off the alarm and slept as late as you pleased.
When you woke up you didn't shower and had cake for breakfast.
Backed the car out of the driveway and into an oncoming vehicle;
the crash sounded like a symphony. You drove away. Arrived
at the construction site and hammered everything wrong;
picked up the circular saw, ran it along the board and across
all four of your fingers. You never wanted them anyway.
The day you finally did everything you thought about doing,
the day you entertained all of those impulses
you'd been suppressing, you came home and called her,
told her you loved her and then went outside to the rose bush
that had been exploding with three new buds a day, looked
at the way it was bowed over, heavy with blossoms, lifted
your work boots and crushed each one purposefully under your feet.

4-28, "I should be studying, I should be studying."

So you file her away, wrap her up and tuck her
in your sock drawer, back in the corner, bury her
underneath the pair with holes in the heels
you can't bring yourself to throw out.

You try not to think about her. She's too pretty,
too popular, too smart, too young, too blond.
She's not your type. She's much too good.
But there comes that time every humid evening

when you lie down, turn on the good music and
take some time for yourself. It's your right
as a single person. You try to think about
that one hot musician. It works for a while,

just long enough to get things going
before you lose the vision. You bring up
the face of that professor, try to imagine
his or her body and it gets you nowhere.

Your hand starts to get tired, you can feel
your wrist getting sore. Picture the comedian,
the actress, the friend of a friend, the one you met
in this bar at that show. You don't want her,

you tell yourself, as you hear a rustling
from the drawer next to the bed. Not a bit,
you whisper, as she climbs out, lands on the floor
and heads your direction. Not me, you yell

as she claws her way up the side of the bed.
You scream, Nooo, a loud wicked howl
as she leans in over your face and you come
and you come and you come and you come.

4/27: who wants to buy momma a new laptop?

I was doing just fine until you second-guessed me.

This afternoon I came home
and I was still fired up.
Looked around for one thing I could control
and settled upon the lawn, the length of the grass.
I dropped off my bag in the house,
unlocked the shed
and brought out the mower.
Filled it up with gas until it overflowed onto the carport
and breathed in deep the smell of it.
I let the dog into the house so he'd stay out of the way,
but only closed the screen door,
so he could watch it all go down. I primed the engine
with three pumps and pulled the throttle. It took two starts
before it would stay on. I mowed down grass
and weeds and wild strawberries
and pretty flowers as tall as my hip. At one point
I looked down at the grass I'd mowed over and saw
some grass still tall, just bent over and right in the middle
a tiny moth, fluttering, hoping. A decision:
save the moth or cut the grass?
But there was no decision to be made. I thought briefly
of your words and pulled the mower back over the grass,
the moth, the sound of your words, the outline of your face.
I mowed on until I finished the lawn but couldn't forget
that fluttering moth, couldn't get
the petroleum taste of your name out of my mouth.

I would have posted but...

...my computer is broke like Michael Jackson, busted like Rihanna's face on Grammy night, crashed like the test dummies.

4/25
----
When I'm dead, don't let them tell you I was kind
without also telling how many people hated me,
how many called me a bitch every day. Don't listen
when they say I was giving and generous and caring
unless they also tell you I refused to marry or
have children because I liked it better when all
of my money, decisions, and time were my own. They might
try to say I was a good writer but for every poem
that might be called decent there are fifty or more
at best suited to be toilet paper. They may talk about
how hard I worked to create social change but there are
so many letters I could have written but did not, so many
calls I only thought about making. When I'm dead,
I hope my eulogy's ugly; if they paint me pretty, they lied.
----
You kissed me
and I fell so damn hard
that I honestly expected to
find myself, sitting bolt upright in a cold sweat
in my bed.
-----
First, he lost his job.
He persevered, decided to rise above,
committed to the idea so strongly that
when he got evicted it didn't even
phase him. His girlfriend left him; no
big deal. It wasn't until he couldn't get
the stove to light that his best friend found him,
curled up in the kitchen floor, marinating
in a puddle of his own tears.


4/26
------
"You're clearly not dedicated enough"
Bitch, please.
The only thing
that you have done longer
than I have written poetry
is suck.
------
But what if he was right?
What if I am not dedicated?
What if everything I ever wrote
sounds the same? What if I never said
anything with meaning, anything worthy
of being heard? What if the only thing
I ever loved for any length of time
didn't love me back? What if I never
should have picked up my pen?
-----
I follow my folly minute to minute.
I'll call you, coyly, invite you to visit
when we both know I mean to make out,
because that's what I'm wanting and
I'm honest to a fault. But if you come over
and are awkward, annoying, or otherwise
off-putting, I will turn just like that
from hostess to bouncer. Some semblance
of the kind girl who invited you in
will remain, but only as a formality.
Leave quickly. You won't want to see
what I change into next.

24/30, last minute draft

Here's the thing of it. I don't know how to write a poem about you
without saying Every time I tell you that I love you it's a lie.
Man nor god never invented any word to tell you what I feel and love
feels so cheap it's a curse word in four letters. I want to say:
I remember every day the time we turned that corner and saw
four women praying to end abortion and I said Girl just look down
and we turned in to the lot and walked inside, hand in hand. That's
closer to the kind of love I want to convey I want to say Sister,
remember that time we got in the car and we drove all day to Kentucky
and whether we went so you could see that boy or so I could forget one
doesn't matter anymore all that matters is stopping in Loretta Lynn's
Country Kitchen on the way back for photos. But I'm getting colder.
I try: I'm glad your brilliant academic career fell flat on its face
so I can still see you even if it's only once a month and we can sit
in the sunshine and talk about our lives like that's actually
what we're talking about instead of why on earth they say the Greek
had four words for love and the Eskimos have twenty or so
and I don't have one that can tell you what I mean. Getting warmer.
If I say the word Friend it's a sorry excuse. If I say soulmate it's
trite, overused and Best Friend fits better on a keychain anyway
I'd tattoo you on my heart but no one would be able to see it it's
important to me that everyone see it so I say: No one has ever
made me feel so completely KNOWN I say: Comrades, Cohorts, Compadres,
say: the best day of my life was that day when I called you,
crying on campus because I was afraid you were dead already and you
answered and you cried right back and you'll always be the strongest
woman I've ever known. Say: I want to be you when I grow up, say:
I know you knew all of this before I even wrote it, didn't you?
Say I love you isn't strong enough but I love you anyway.

day 23 bonus haiku and cinquain

the month is april.
the temperature is ninety.
must be arkansas.

------------------

this flip-
flop is rubbing
right on that tick bite and
i wish i had something to rub
you out.

23/30 - one week left :(

The next time that I see you I will make certain
you're asleep. Until then, there are some things
I must learn. The silence of the deepening dusk,
for one, and the stealth a creeping kitten thinks
she has, but does not. Anatomy, amateur surgery,
lightning speed. I want to learn precision
from those men who paint the names on the grains
of rice at the county fair before placing it
in the tiny jar so that when I come to you
I will know exactly how to sneak up without
you waking, how to delicately carve open
the left side of your chest, and mine, how
to swap our hearts and before I close the cavity
I will paint our names on the heart in your chest,
paint "I love you," paint "I miss you," paint
"Where have you been all my life, sister dear?"

22.5/30: the carpenter's daughter cannot cry

I spent so many Saturdays in my father's woodshop
that every Friday night I dream of sawdust.
One learns certain things in a woodshop
that cannot be learned anywhere else in the world.
I forget that some things are not common knowledge,
for example: Water on wood that is in the ground
means life. Water on wood that is not
will ruin everything. I know this as surely as I know
that the sun will rise on Sunday and I'll realize
(with a sadness) I don't have wood glue stuck
to my fingertips, as surely as I know I've loved
my father like trees love the sun.

I fall in love with geographical locations,
with certain songs whose harmonies stroke me,
with dishes of food and colors of sky.
I almost fell in love with a boy once.
I would have given him my love, given him
a fighting chance at staking a flag
on the left side of my chest. Seriously:
he could have been a tattoo. It was like that.

And you, dear friend, we've spent so many nights
up until four, doing nothing but laying in bed
cuddling and laughing and talking about this boy
you've loved, that boy I fucked, this girl
we hate and why and where and how many times
and the natures of our beings and what it means
to truly live. I trusted you with everything.
I thought you knew everything I knew.

But you watched over my house while I was away
and you didn't know that thing about water
and wood that is not alive, and you took
the chopsticks that the boy I almost loved
brought me from some small country in Asia
when he went there with the girl who is not me
and traveled for a month and it was the one thing,
the consolation prize I had from our almost-love
and you left them sitting in dishwater in my sink.

They are broken now. I would cry over them,
but tears, as it happens, are made of water, too.

22/30: The man who could rewind time.

The first thing he did
was win a whole bunch of money.
They boys at the track thought he just
"had a knack," a "good picker."
He made sure to lose at the poker tables
just often enough.

The money (it was a surprise
even though he'd heard it
a million times before) did not
buy happiness. So he met a girl.
Learned her habits well enough to rewind
and win her over. Made her love him.
It was easier than picking the
trifecta, the daily double, he knew
everything about her before they'd even met
(for the eighteenth time) and they married,
raised a family, and he did it all
just exactly right. Handled every situation
perfectly (by the eighth or ninth try),
was a model father, a perfect husband and at the end
of it all, as he lay on his deathbed,
he found himself too afraid to die.

So he went back.
Became a bank robber. An astronaut.
A famous country singer. President.
Learned kung fu, calculus, French.
Read all the books he meant to,
twice.
He still wasn't happy.

He began inventing favorite ways to die.
Driving off bridges was a fun one,
rewinding just as the front of the car
kissed the water hello. He'd play with time,
see just how far he could push it - how much
carbon monoxide he could breathe and still
go back.

Eventually he started getting confused;
surely you can imagine. When you've lived
a thousand lifetimes it must be hard to tell
which one you're living now.
It wasn't until she saw the girl he'd married
in the grocery, walking alongside another man
(one who'd won her fair and square)
with the same exact two babies they'd borne
that the real, heavy-hitting questions about life
and meaning and the nature of reality wore him down.
He ran up to her, crying, but of course
she did not know him. When he demanded
that the babies were his own, she called for the police.
When he snatched at them, tried to run,
they knocked him down. The report later said
he'd reached into his pocket and they'd thought
he had a gun, so they fired and he clean
disappeared.
There was nothing else to say.

21/30: TAL#175

Her strictly Catholic mother called her a whore
before she even knew what it meant,
how to spell it even, her mother's eyes
stabbing judgments into her back, so she did
what any kid who wants to survive a parent must do:
she lied.

Their name (she said) was McCreary, a lovely family,
the son six, the daughter five, the wife
just lovely, charming, kind and the husband
busy and important: a secret government agent,
so she couldn't give her mother the phone number,
or the address to the house where she babysat;
it was a matter of government security, of course.

They had a summer home, too, near the lake,
and she had to go with them, and her brother
went too, a good role model for the son, they said.
They spent every weekend out there, all summer long
and her mother was so pleased, her eyes now
clear, now proud, asking the most important question:
"And what do they think of me?"
She gave the only possible reply:
"They think you're wonderful."

Years later, after the McCrearys moved away
and the girl grew up, made her own family,
a real one, she confronted her mother one day,
called her out for all her wrongs, her lies,
each nail she'd hammered in and she broke down,
cried: "I did the best I could."
It was the first truth the girl could remember
being spoken between them.