Verb and Reverb

 

10 Lessons I’ve learned about Love

1. The first bird, baited and hooked by a crooked conman, understands her cage, but cannot hear how freedom rings with freedom wings. The second bird, spurred by a relentless wave of succor and salve, understands her freedom but refuses to take flight. Both birds will stay, but only the latter one will sing.
2. Have you ever begged an ass to budge, and on the third try he finally listens? Yeah, neither have I.
3. The musicmen bank billions off of our heartache. Not every love song makes a killing off a birdsong that was willing. Listen to what he does not say.
4. Even the best salesmen dance around the byproduct of the lie he just sold you. Listen to what he does not say.
5. A skilled thief takes his time with it; studies his Pearl incessantly before pick-pocketing a woman he can not afford to buy. Pretty girl, watch who’s watching you.
6.  But once you have been bought, pay all that love back. Shake, ratttle and pour his hands clean with all that loveback. 
7. I mean, stack his rooftops high and overflowing from all that golden backtrack.
8. I imagine love a thunderous boomclap— terrifyingly able to move mountains.
9. Or humble those mountains into molehills, because forgiveness be an action word, a moving verb, our singing bird.
10. Yes, the battle has been won. But baby, this is my warcry: whatever has drifted let it stray, whatever God has anchored, let him stay.

about// We're bombarded daily with what love is supposed to mean or be or feel like; it's literally enough to give me a panic attack. This poem is my way of sifting through the madness.

A Breathing Thing

Something about the way she spits “stories” out

When referring to God’s Holy Book

Elicits a distressed damsel
on the horseback of her beloved knight, moments

After slaying a saw-toothed dragon

or something equally 

Entertaining, fabricated, fictitious.

I can see bible characters dancing a two-step

Around her mind’s eye:

Noah and his dove chirping its newfound canticle;

Baby Jesus tucked into the manger;

Baby Jesus babbling bubbling bobbles of knowledge;

Baby Jesus Always Mary’s Infantile Miracle 

Always. 

Baby. 

Jesus.

But what ever became of his breath or blood?

When the serpent seduced the woman

(Bowing to her sweet altar of fruitless sin),

Were my own two feet not driven from the 

Flaming swords of fire at the garden’s gates?

And how many miles I have sprinted alongside Jonah!

His hand in mine,

Each footfall and burning gush of lung 

in sync with the other.

Together we feigned escape 

While the weight of responsibility kicked at our heels.

I can still feel his eyes burning into my own

As we crouched gutless inside the whales gut:

Even here, the eyes of God are alight with glory.

And what of my fellow poet and bleeding heart, Jeremiah?

Real mantears soiling my skin as we mourned the

Loss of Motherhood.

Did he not- with his own aching lamentation- teach 

Me how to cry loudly into one palm
while still cradling hope in the other?

The woman who wept at our Lord's feet,
a harlot among The One hand-cut of heaven
Saul, the killer of Christ's brothers
And I, a sinner if ever there was one--
We have pined and repined at our unworthiness,
all the while throwing our arms up to the sky in gratitude.

Or as the Tempter taunted Jesus to kill himself
Were my own wrists not minutes away from the blade?
A beckoning to let go of a burden
that was not mine to bear.

If all you hear are vowels and nouns,
characters stuck in an ancient fable
and not the voice of God Himself,
I challenge you to peer deeper.

Scriptural references: Genesis 3:1-5, 23-24; Jonah 1:3, 2:1-9; Lamentations 1:1, 16; Luke 7:37, 38; Acts 8:1-3; Matthew 4:5, 6

About// "The word of God is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints from the marrow, and is able to discern thoughts and intentions of the heart." -Hebrews 4:12

When You Ask Me Where I Come From

I hail from the East!
A wild, incorrigible beast
Not even the Atlantic could bear to seize.
Human spitball of the sea
regurgitate further inland.

Norfolk, was I too big a burden to
cradle along your coast
that you cast me into the mountains?

And from that vast fountain,

bubbled my first
inclination of Home.
Just like a child, I inclined
toward the sky,
with one sole intention:
to bike my way down that hill.
Wheels punchdrunk on mud,
of course I crashed,
heart spilled across the pavement,
Yet still, I stayed filled,
stayed full of fountain until
I ruptured that mountain's skin
and bled into the snow.

Asheville, can you forgive me for
outgrowing your flesh and limestone,
Bone of bark trunkbody?

Or even when disembodied,
the DNA lingers inside the blood.
Flood of snowpuddle finger my feet,

Tentacle my underskin with cold.

Old Cold wants to know

How I plan to master tenacity 

If I do not face the cruel audacity of winter.

I want to tell it: 

“I don’t know, man, I’m all of eleven,
your nuance toward death is beyond my prepubescence."
Everything I knew about heaven,
were the angels who melted at the first sign of sun.

Still, it was you, Columbus,
who taught me how to mourn.
Small town fists broke bounds of
my fractured, aching rib cage. 

Which prison break staged 

a teenaged daydream—

Stunt like a pauper, fall like a king.

I had it all, but was all but dying,

Do you know what I mean?

Ohhhhh-hio 

Gilded wasteland 

Whose rollinghill mother 

Birthed a bastard wolf 

And would not or could not nurse 

The mess she’d made

(How could I suck from her milkpoison 

And then pray that I survive it?)

Did you hear me, Cincinnati?

When I crawled out your cervix, crying

Only to bang at your valley gates to let me back in?

Lovesong-void haiku,

Northeastern intermission:

So I ran outside of you, Keene,

Sprinted fireball of lightning strike flung

Across your royal forests.

How I envied your adornment!

But because I was naked and ashamed,

I finally understood mercy.

Yes, I am scarred back and bloody knuckles,
dirty south all up in my fingernails-

it is here I am forgiven.

Yes, I am knocking knees and two left feet,

it is here I am forgiven.

I have never been this alone before,

I have never felt less forsaken.

I am listening to you, Atlanta,

talk back to me, my sweet.

about// Because I moved around so much as a kid, it's been hard to identify one specific place that I consider "home." I suppose this poem is my way of trying to figure that out.

Recovery, Jazz and Other Winding Roads

 
Hi, my name is Maureen and I am addicted to my sadness.

The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem
with this neck-deep muck and mire;
Dire hand like quicksand
(such slow but steady sinking)
wrapped around my throat.

Step two:

“Hope is the thing with feathers”,
Yet tethered to eternity
clings distrust,
wings weathered from
what could have been,
but never was now lost.

Step three is my neck cocked to the side
gut-wrenching
with holey wrists hung to bear my
torture stake:
“Father into your hands, I entrust my spirit.”

I have had the wind shot up my spine
and clear out my body
trying to climb step four,
trying to third world war myself dead in the mirror--
demons dancing circles around my reflection,
rejection and all.

Step five is
my blood spilled upon this page
and me begging your forgiveness

I stay stuck, back-bucked-body-doubled
on the likes of number six.
I mean what does that even mean?
To be ready to change?
To say "I will feel this joy if it kills me
in its making"?

Step seven is not your
run-of-the-mill Hail Mary
Is not "Our father which art in heaven
hallowed be thy name..."
It is my nose to the dirt
a sweat and snot elixir
staining the ground inches beneath my face
praying 'God don't break my beat-down soul.'

Step Eight ways to say I'm sorry:
I'm sorry for being here
and not really being here.

I am sorry I let you down again.
I am sorry I didn't pick up the phone.
I am sorry my quiet is so obnoxiously loud.
I am sorry my sadness is shaped like pride.
I am sorry that sorry is never enough.

Step nine is my finger on the trigger
aimed directly at his heart,
shooting bullets made of candy kisses
until he lets me in.

There is no step ten,
but rather an up-hill of patched ice
and misunderstanding.
Though the slope seems steep,
keep my eyes at my feet
and toward infinity may my aching arm ever reach.

When life hands you lemons,
eleven will not make the lemonade,
but will shift your focus from that closest
sour pulp sadness
to the raw sugar that is in the honey and the trees and
that one jazz standard that makes
puckered and sunk-in cheeks
seem sweeter.

And step twelve?
Twelve is you closing this page

and hoping you can still hear me.

ABOUT: I wrote this years ago, but was talking recently with a friend about how difficult it is to accept that you have a mental illness. Largely because our society as a whole has for so long put a stigma on any kind of condition that doesn't have visible symptoms. Please know you are not alone.

Nocturne

No one questioned the wolf’s alternatives

(if there was any other way

For a wolf to be born).

It is too easy to look at its glaring grin, 

Feel the edge of its howl cutting into your bone

And prefer it dead over living.

No one said to the wolf

“Here, take this soft fuzz

Take these Big, bug-round eyes

Take these dulled and docile teeth,

I grant you the un-alarming geste 

Of a rabbit.”

I was bomb

Catapult with violence 

into an immense and darkening night.

It was not calm I was gifted, but

Claws— that I may fight my way out this night.

I was given teeth

And a loud song.

My eyes were never meant to be a warning;

When you see two rays emanating golden in the black,

Please know I, too, was born in fear of this dark.

But I can see now.

I thank Jehovah God 

for this sight.

about//  the survival tactics of a wolf.

On Salami

Here we are, yet again.

(“We” being people and I;

True, I am also a person,

But by no means am I “People.”)

So. Here we are. 

The People are speaking with such fervor about salami.

Fresh-cut butcher’s salami.
Does it taste good with turkey rye and provolone questionmarkquestionmarkexclamationpoint

The way Chucky winks butchering the salami.

One of The People thinks he is cute—
Chucky, winking and smirking
through the smeared plexiglas like that.

Another has crossed him off as creepy,
is willing to drive five miles out of the way to Publix
because Ain’t no man need to be winking at me anyhow.

“I prefer Greek-Italian Salami,
it’s just better you know what I mean, Maureen?”

The lights dim. The room silences in perfect harmony.

A chilling east wind slams the door shut.

Everything I know about lunch meat is spinning around my head. 

Suddenly the universe itself is revolving around

My core beliefs on salami.

Naturally, I have none.

“You’re so quiet!” The People revolt.

I apologize profusely,

Though for what I’m not sure.

For once, I want to know what it feels like

To be impassioned by the sort of talk that

Has no middle, beginning or end

ABOUT: if I had a dollar for every time I had nothing of value to add to a conversation, I could afford to Airbnb a cabin in the middle of the woods for a week.

Principia- The Physics of Fight

One, “every object persists in its state of rest

Or uniform motion in a straight line
unless it is compelled to change
that state by forces impressed on it.”

My mother thought she was carrying a boy.

(This was before most realized that
Woman, too, can be synonymous with warrior.)

I was going to be named “Harry.”

Harry the quarterback, bulldozing touchdowns in her belly.

Or Harry the Samurai, hai-ya! Take that, Pre-birth placental swine!

I have been persisting (insisting) in this state of uniform rage 

Encaged in it, foaming and seething incurable cage.

Will You now be said force that compels me to change?

Two, 

We were two creatures entwined

In a warfare so fine

That from afar we looked more like lovers

Decelerating faster than the speed of light

(this is the part of the poem

where time stood still)

Three, 

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction:

In spite of this rage, I love you

Out of spite for this rage, I love you

For all of this anger there is an equal and opposite quantum of joy.

About: anger and fight and joy- all of which have curiously coexisted in my belly since birth.