Open-minded

"You're different" he says from across the center console. The inside of his Tacoma is ripe with the soapy scent of cardboard pine.

I look out through the windshield as a stranger, an outsider looking in, searching for familiarity but finding that something has changed. Everything has changed.

"I love you" he says. And I realize that everything is me.

He is shaking his head in that tortured way like my dad used to. Like this is hurting them more than it hurts you. Like they don't make the rules they just follow them, live and die by them.

And then I am suddenly seven years old, lying beneath my pink checkered sheets, waiting for Dad to come home. I am listening to Mom pace. I am listening to my sister dreaming. I am straining to hear the gentle push of the door opening, the clicks of his leather boots as they make their way up the stairs. But I hear nothing. I don't remember falling asleep but I do, and when I wake up he is on the couch, smiling like he never left. And Mom is smiling, too, but it's a fragile thing, cracked a little on the corners.

"I love you, too" I say. And I wonder if I'm smiling my mom's smile. I wonder if he notices the cracks.
I don't think he does. And I don't think that he notices that I'm giving him only half. If he does, he doesn't show it.
After all, it's only fair.

Homeless in Berkeley

Homeless in Berkeley

He, in his bed of yesterday's newspapers, is sleeping well.

Around him an instinctive panic errupts within the mobile public;

They retreat to the opposite end of the sidewalk,

stepping around coffee stands,

maneuvering aside light posts,

tightening grips on children's shoulders,

to be as far away from him as possible.

Oh so nonchalontly. Hardly anyone will notice.

To him, their rushing footsteps are nothing but a lullaby,

a rhythm by which his dreams abide.

put-put sounds the shoes on the pavement, put-put march the soldiers through the grasslands in Vietnam.

If God Walked Among Us

If God Walked Among Us

I idle in the solitude of time. Its passage is welcome and it is not welcome.
Minutes and years are apples and pears, only never fully ripe, just a little hard.
Oarsmen have turned to pilots, pilots to astronauts,
Girls have turned to women, who have turned to girls again.

I simply raise my hand and let it be so. You could raise your hand, but it would not be so.
Although sometimes I wish that it could be.
What is there to see when you've seen everything?
Where can I go when each cave and crevice is as familiar to me as my own hands and feet?
Yet not as precious to me as my own hands and feet?

I idle in the solitude of time, restless with fate and hopes of the End.

Recycled Ideas

recycled ideas

a single simple thought
stroking the crisp edge of a yellowing autumn leaf,
meanders, to-and-fro, down to the musty earth.

it glides over the dusty chasms of history, softly,
up the desert-brushed lands of the thirty-years war,
to laze in the lapping tides of the Ganges, silently.

a thought, a spectator of youth and age, trial and error, dismissed
in a dainty rush of exhaled breath; a sigh
fleeing from the lips of an exhausted philosopher
to turn in its grave a hundred years hence.

Your Lover is an Actress

He undressed me beneath the stage.
I danced the roles of the actors above,
feeling the emotions from my eyebrows to my toes,
naked with sadness of thirty years of womanhood.

I pleaded for fairness with the fullness of my pouted lips
and scorned ex-lovers with the curves of my breasts;
were it a comedy I would not have laughed,
a tragedy I would not have cried.

It was a saga of touches and turmoil,
a soliloquy of a woman undone.

Under the dress rehearsals and stage directions, I lived it all.
I exhaled the rawness with swift bends of my elbows, a sway of my swelled thighs.
He admired me because of what I had felt,
what I was capable of feeling.

He watched my body move like a wooden bow strains to make music of strings -- and it was a beautiful sound of rain and dishwater.

I bowed and he applauded. Above me the curtains closed.

rain

rain
I go outside and it feels cold on my skin.
It spatters over my eyes so I close them,
and let the water play upon my lids like young children.
I can hear the drops laughing as they splash in their rubber boots,
then run home to drink hot chocolate with Mom,
and tell her all about the wonders from the sky,
while their hands thaw out from the cold.

Peru

Peru,

I look forward to meeting you,
to making myself at home,
when I am far from home.

To take off my shoes on your welcome mat
and walk barefoot through the rooms of your house,
to smell the sweet air and to shake hands with the history of the Incas.

I cant wait to lose myself in the hospitality of your shores,
in the clear water of the surf,
to mold with my bare hands the memories of your perfect sunsets.

My shoulders long to become olive under your yellow sun
and my eyes to swell with the sights of the world.

Fix You

My body is at war with my sanity. They bicker back and forth over my chastity like ex-lovers bicker over who gets to keep the couch. My body is practical in its reasoning, tactful in its approach. My sanity is cunning and seasoned at sophistry.

They pull and tug within me. I am at their mercy.

"I am in the midst of a civil war," I whisper. "You kiss me and I hear the cannons loading."

His eyes are the color of summer. He looks at me, at my calloused feet and doorknob knees, and smiles. I smile, too. Sometime in between, a lifetime has passed and my mask has crumbled away from me. I gaze down at the indecipherable pieces and know that my body has won.

And then, under the cool shadow of the clock tower, he kisses me. This time I do not pull away.

Somewhere in Berkeley the white flag of my sanity is fluttering across a sunlit sky.