What You Pay with your Heart and Guts

I slide the credit card through the slim slot
like I force my body through the tiny hole of lies
every time I spend too much,
give too much,
or overstay a situation too long.
I need to take that credit card and rip it up,
so I have no debt or obligation
like I need to close the door tight
when I am done with a phase
or deal, or relationship..
When it is over...it is over....
I need to know that.
And when a credit card doesn't serve to delight,
but causes fear and stress
my heart needs to close tight,
just like my wallet when the thing I am buying,
or the time I am spending
doesn't work f or me anymore
sucks me dry until there is only a morsel of a tear left
that I can barely feel on my cheek...
I pay the price with every breath
when I don't move on..
when I don't follow my dream
to the back doors of Broadway theaters
concerts, art, Monets and Picassos
I need to dive into the ocean
allow myself to drift to another continent
or I will pay with my afterlife
and have to come back and do this over and over
until I know to stop buying and paying
for things that mean nothing to me
so I need to eat the lava of the volcano
swallow it whole and stop, just stop it
stop doing what I don't want to do
the anxiety and panic of paying for nothing,
satisfaction not guaranteed..
when I was young I wanted to travel the world,
I wanted to be an actress
have one Italian affair after another
with young muscular, self endowed men....
when I don't live up to my imagination,
then I am left under the covers, shivering, empty and cold.

Scars

Scars

Thick, pulsating, red, bulging beatings to my heart and soul. You feel too much, you want too much, you need too much. Too much. Deep down the mother scar, the crack of the bone, the tear of skin, the blood that bleeds from the heart. Love me, says the little girl, love me, pick me up and cradle me. But there is no mother to be found. No mother except the one sitting on the edge of the toilet slitting her wrists…she runs through the streets naked screaming, tearing her hair from her head, then she runs after me like an alligator opening her big jaw and sharp teeth and pulls me under the tub water, I can’t breathe, help…I am drowning in the snoot and goo of the darkness of my mother’s mental illness. She wants to destroy her own children, she is Medea, murdering her children.

What do you carry

I carry a hump on my back that looks like a mountain that rises from beyond the horizon. This is the hump that carries self hatred, resentments and jealousies...of loneliness and despair. It comes from the last time I died from the death of my sister. The last time I put the flower on my mother’s dead body…The last time my father held my arm before he died and said, “I love you.” A declaration he never expressed while alive. I carry the black hole of hunger for eating the earth and sun and stars. The black hole where the Shekinah has to fill or I might never be human again.

What do you drive and what drives you

I drive a big red SUV where I clap my hands and it starts to roar and race down the road. It holds me safe and tight and I can slide with ease, a mother to the world…This drive to connect, to be one with the earth, like my car to the road...this need to feel the wheels hitting each rock, each pebble, each stone unturned under my feet, like the wheels of the car to cross across mysterious terrain that can either eat me alive or ignite me to life.

I Had a Dream

I had a dream…A psychic surgeon stuck his moldy, creamy hand into my chest and pulled out my bleeding heart. She stroked the stream of beating pulses and read the rhythms of my soul, the emotions that broke the core of my being, the heartbreak of losing my life’s love. I dreamt in the corners of the bed sheets, where the perspiration from my aching loss was left on the pillow and on the soles of my feet. I reached out to the softness of the night and saw an eye staring down at me, calling to me to touch his skin and kiss his mouth. The shaman bit my neck and drank my blood and poured it into a wine glass, handed it to my mysterious lover to drink. Lips moved and the walls vibrated with his gulps and orgasmic laughter. Again, the hurt of his vanishing, his abandonment, his lost fingers and tongue that licked me in the middle of the night were gone. I shriveled up, old and longing to be given this elixir, I needed him so much, and dreaded that only his whisper would awaken me to life again. I had a dream...that I was wrapped in ecstasy around legs of steel, I touched his back and felt the burden I was to him, because I needed his love more than I needed my own heart.

Unbearable Loss

Courage of yearning
Unbearable loss
Life is turned over
All before...child’s play
Word to ear, sounds to mimic
The loss of you leaks out of me
The loss that changed the course of my life
Loss as growing up...loss as an initiation
Jet stream of darkness
Goodbyes are too sad
I detach or cry forever