Showing posts with label the finishing project. Show all posts

The Finishing Project: Installment Eight






Sundays are My Day to Sleep In

The day began
with unnerving sleep.
Where is she?!
Oh. Dad's got her.

Rushed. Cold coffee
Reheated leftovers for breakfast
He cooked with headphones on.
He never does that.
He must be stressed.

Cheeks flushed with action and irritation
and I realize I am horrible
at holding any of his negative emotion.
Since he almost never has any,
I've never had to practice.
Another reason to believe you'll be a shitty mom.
Which requires both a ferocious attachment and slick letting-go.
I'm afraid
it's going to hurt
too much.

I showered carelessly, not having to listen for her.
We drove, bickered, silenced.
Your playlists, the country roads
Restore.

Family arriving,
hiding in the red room,
note to self: she is a great social excuse.
Soft cotton dress from France.
Rocking us both
Overtired and perpetually hungry.

Shaky man with used hands of dark leather.
He love kids and grows sweet tomatoes.
Every time, the same excuse, "My balance isn't what it used to be."
I hug him anyway. Hard.
I wrote you a poem, but it's not good enough.

Too estranged to make new memories,
We sit reminiscing about the old ones.

Yesterday you obeyed me.
Now you flit and flirt about my head like a mosquito.
Annoyed, I cannot ignore you, but I cannot pen you down
or swat you dead
Once and for all.

We all yawn together in the easy night.
poetry the finishing project
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The Finishing Project: Installment 7

A Poem Everywhere

As my husband makes me
a pastrami sandwich
(it's the second meal he's cooked today)
I write.

And as I linger
longer than responsible
in the hot shower
(it's my first-world privilege)
I write.

And as I impatiently wait
for my second coat to dry
(it's the bluegray of my daughter's eyes)
I write.

And as I speak with my friend
about death and sex and dreamjobs
(it's the way her copper dreadlocks affect)
I write.

And as I push down
on the french press
(it's still fucking broken?! Why hasn't he fixed that?)
I write.

And as she suckles
the life out of me
(it's enough for both of us to share)
I write.

Words, I write you.
Will you then leave
me be?
poetry the finishing project
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The Finishing Project: Installment Six


How to Make a Person

You are not a task
to be checked off my list.
So I break down
the care of you into bite-size pieces,
the sum of which may produce a well-adjusted humanoid.

Or so I hope
you will not remember these years,
and yet they are the most important to your development.
Your choice of mate, your temperament, your personality
all in the resentful hands of a selfish girl
I despise
the paradox of this.

There is no choice.
If I don't have what it takes,
I still have to do it.
I force my creative mind into nap-hour.
The discomfort of my still tootight postpartum jeans.

I want each task to bring about a desired result.
Cause and Effect at its core.
Why do you defy the laws of physics.

Oh, I forgot you
were a superhumanhero.


Another one did these things for me once,
She was so young.
I loved her long, dark hair.
Her smell, my sustenance.
Even now.

Alas,
You wake.
Your scent, my biological betrayal. 
I will always come to you.
becoming a mother motherhood poetry
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The Finishing Project: Installment Four



Date Night

Tears in my chai.
We force connection
isn't so hard.
date night dates poetry
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The Finishing Project: Installment Three



Perambulating

They say Cancers lean toward hyperbole.
A making of something out of nothing.
A life-threatening walk in the Sahara or an arduous walk to the library with a faulty baby carrier.
It's all the same to me.
Or to my imagination.
There are similarities, I swear!

The unforgiving sun penetrating coveringcloth,
The mercilessly steep and endless uphills.
The body's screams of musclemaddness and throat angst.
The carrying of a heavy, crying, overexposed child.

The desperation of knowing that I have no other choice
than to do exactly what I don't want to do.
Which is to press on.
Knowing that there is no one else to save us,
that this time we have to make it home on our own strength.
Still naively believing that if I plead enough,
Someone, somewhere will rescue me.

Then the after annoyance of accomplishing it,
The moving-on dishonors, invalidates.

We walk together,
You and I.
Kind and hateful memories will me on.
poetry the finishing project
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The Finishing Project: Installment Two



Afraid of the Dark

Not all the dark is scary, little one.

The cosmos contain dark matter, lurid with nothingness,
but twinkling with potential.
The nighttime makes love to lurking shadows,
but gifts the weary with slumber and the thirsty with wine.
Black colors the funeral mourners,
but hugs curves with a slimming elegance.
Gray is the hue of the pregnant clouds above,
but its cleansing waters feed the earth and steep the tea.
The human insides swirl in dim obscurity,
but the bone is white as snow - once it has died.

The best dark I ever encountered 
was the darkness I saw when I shut my eyes tightly
(then tighter still)
while laboring to bring you into this world.
I saw mothers everywhere, dead, alive, barren, childless.
All straining with me in the great black void
in luminescent darkness of love.
poetry the finishing project
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The Finishing Project: Installment One


Day One


BRIDGE

A river flows between us.
A water wrought with words
unsaid and swallowed,
coughed up and splashed about.

When we speak them --
stopping along the wet bank to pluck out the smooth stones
for examination and admiration
of time's stamp upon their unbreakable surface --
We are calmed.  

A bridge then constructs itself,
Extending from your insides to mine.

And again our life raft is tethered together,
navigating the current with not so much ease or grace 
(both are overrated),
but with togetherness,
a kind of connection 
fought for instead of bestowed.

My love,
the distance was not as it seemed.
It was only un-bridged words.

Let's go get a drink and talk.



-09.16.12





p.s. there is still time to join this project...writing a poem or prose each day, finishing to completion.  let me know if you want to join and I'll add you to the private FB group.
joel and i marriage poetry
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