Poetry like rain

Heavy cold rains pouring down, a welcome relief. The dog furious that I have taken away his sunshine. Put down old  threadbare rugs and towelling at the back door to catch the tracked-in mud, took out rain jackets and  wellington boots from the spare room. Planning a luxurious fish pie for supper with a little smoked salmon, flaked yellowtail fish and cream, buttery mashed potatoes with a little grated Parmesan. Rain like dull music in the background, punctuated by  deep sighs from the housebound Great Dane. The smaller dogs are curled up tight on the  sofa, content to  snuggle indoors for the day. The  overgrown puppy sits staring out at the falling rain, wondering  when I will relent and make it hot and bright again.

I’m sad too, gazing out at the rain on a dark morning, because one of my favourite poets died this week, the iconic lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich, at the age of 82. I had been waiting for another book from her and  feel bereft to know that trenchant political voice has gone silent. For at least 30 years I have carried her poems around with me, bought new  books of poetry and essays, I remember finding a copy of A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far and  taking it with me everywhere, learning the poems off by heart, unsure what I was reading except that it stirred me. And borrowing The Dream of a Common Language until I could buy my own copy. The essays: On Lies, Secrets and Silence, the book examining myths around motherhood (Of Woman Born), the radical revolutionary  statements, the fearlessness. I suppose I don’t mention her often enough because I try to sidestep controversy here, but in all my thinking there has been  the debt owed to Adrienne Rich, the mother of three sons, Jewish, lesbian, disabled by rheumatoid arthritis, that voice speaking to women about  what might be possible.

“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”

She refused the National Medal of the Arts in 1997. “The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote in a letter addressed to then-President Clinton. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

She established solidarity with silenced women in apartheid South Africa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, worked with  refugees and  spoke out constantly against bigotry and prejudice.

“To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence — words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.”

So strange to live on a world without Adrienne Rich there. She was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath, of Anne Sexton in the 1950s and ’60s, began with polite ladylike poems that echoed the great men poets of the day. She changed, she found her own voice and dared to use it. What might Plath have written if she had not committed suicide? What might Anne Sexton have written if she had not been snared by alcoholism? Again and again in her poetry, Adrienne Rich urges women  to move beyond victimisation, to fight for a better life, to believe in themselves and the dream of a common language.

Sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair. And this is she
with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head
turning aside from pain, is dragging down deeper
where it cannot hear me,
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

What can be said out loud

Last night I sat up reading Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. James was something of a hypochondriac and  suffered from various ‘mysterious illnesses’. He came from a family that complained incessantly to one another  about their ailments although most of them were healthy and lived long and active lives. As the church bell up the road  chimed midnight, I realised that one of these mysterious illnesses that caused James such ‘spiritual angst’ was constipation. The biographer Edel was too polite in 1962 or so to mention such an undignified illness. Poor Henry James at 28 years old, hanging about in draughty cathedrals in Rome waiting for something to happen. Misreading, I thought he was cruising beautiful Italian men and hoping for an amorous moment. (Edel is also very coy about James being homosexual, more coy than James himself.)

A fierce wind blowing today, crisp and bracing. The sky a deep hot blue. In scrunched-up brown paper packets on the kitchen table there are shitake mushrooms picked in woods high on the mountains and  a dozen fresh brown eggs with brilliant orange yolks.  News that the price of black peppercorns is about to increase by 300 percent, ominous. The politics of food, the economics of availability. I remember something Bill Bryson wrote in At Home and how it surprised me:

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. Exactly the same is true of husbandry. The animals we raise for food today are eaten not because they are notably delectable or nutritious or a pleasure to be around, but because they were the ones first domesticated in the Stone Age.

Are we that unimaginative? Speaking of which, I have to facilitate a literacy workshop this afternoon and  the community hall was burned down in riots last week. We may have to chase cows away from under shady thorn trees and sit there instead. If the flies are not too unbearable. Or the smell of fresh cow pats not too smelly.

Life. It’s what it is. What are we allowed to say about it? How do we unlearn shamemaking discourses?

So that we can write directly, honestly and  uncoyly about constipation or eating disorders or being gay or admitting we can’t drink any longer? One thing that always moves me about meetings is the willingness of some to go out on a limb and  share what caused them so much anguish and shame, how hard it was to fix the wreckage  piled  up when they finally got sober, who forgave and who didn’t,  what went on going wrong even in sobriety when they were doing all the right things. Stories without a built-in moral or happy ending, stories that talk about finding oneself in the awkward stuck places in life. And I love those too who hear such stories to the end and don’t rush in to try and fix things, don’t  shout out, ‘but they lived happily ever after!’ like a battle cry. A friend who read a post I wrote about family therapy sent me this quotation from the therapist Michael White:

”And what of solidarity? I am thinking of a solidarity that is constructed by therapists who refuse to draw a sharp distinction between their lives and the lives of others, who refuse to marginalize those persons who seek help, by therapists who are constantly confronting the fact that if faced with the circumstances such that provide the context of troubles of others, they just might not be doing nearly as well themselves.”

Oh, this and that

Time for a break from work, the grindstone. Six thousand words written, perhaps one good sentence.

The former art teacher has been telling long magnificent anecdotes about how her grandmother attended Queen Mary at Balmoral as a lady-in-waiting and  predicted wars, family deaths and the downfall of the aristocracy to startled royalty who had never met a psychic before. In gratitude for the  predictive gossip, Queen Mary gave the psychic grandmother her long string of  creamy royal pearls and the latter pawned them at once and set sail for the tropical colonies and  a life of wickedness and gaiety. Just as you think this is all made-up, the art teacher produces a dog-eared photograph of  Queen Mary looking  bosomy but sourly prim and powdered next to a fat giggly woman with marcelled hair and a seal-skin jacket  who has the art teacher’s eyes. Who knows?

The Great Dane puppy is cantering around with a stolen onion in his mouth, hoping to be chased and wrestled to the ground. I am reading a post on the Five Most Common Mistakes When Cooking Quinoa because my quinoa is not always what it should be.

The former art teacher says that some days she feels only 37 or so. She reminds me that the Russian ballet dancer and  Bloomsbury character Lydia Lopokova lived to be almost 90 and  sunbathed naked in her English country garden well into her 80s. She outlived most of the Bloomsbury coterie.

Vanessa Bell’s ten-year-old granddaughter Henrietta discovered by chance the funny, crinkly old lady who lived up the lane. They had sausage for elevenses or a glass of Sauternes for tea and Lydia Lopokova chatted gaily about ballet and death. ‘To have wrinkles is to be noble,’ she told her visitor. ‘We all of us grow old, what matters is how you age.’

Caponata for supper, a lively bowl of sliced aubergine, red peppers, ripe-to-bursting tomatoes, onions, garlic and  some chilli flakes,  a grind of black pepper, a little Maldon salt, all simmered together in good olive oil. Mediterranean bliss. Accompanied by perfected quinoa and  a little green salad.

Apartment Therapy has posted a bunch of photographs showing famous writers’ bedrooms. (The image above shows Flannery O’Connor’s bedroom in Milledgeville, Georgia, with her propped-up aluminium crutches.) I may be a fledgling writer but my bedroom right now looks like a mix between a dog kennel and a library that has run out of bookshelves. The dog has crawled under the bed with his crunchy onion and I must go and  coax him out. Perhaps  the  old sheeps’ wool slippers I last saw in 2009 might turn up, along with  onion skins, forgotten Moleskine diaries and some grey ancestral ghost choking on dust.

Flannery O’Connor: To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

This creature, this body

Monday morning meditation, complete with yawning. The week turning over, emails dashing in about work, commissions, rejections, requests, project briefs. That brief slow space of meditation carrying me into the day, the ups and downs of it. Wordlessness, silence, contemplation.

Rowan Williams, no longer Archbishop of Canterbury and I am sure a happier man for it:

“Contemplation, in other words, is a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world; it identifies the real damaging pathologies of human life, our violent obsessions with privilege, control, and achievement, as arising from the refusal to know and love oneself a creature, a body … The hope professed by Christians of immortal life cannot be a hope for a non-mortal way of seeing the world; it is rather a trust that what our mortality teaches us of God opens up the possibility of knowing God or seeing God in ways for which we have, by definition, no useful mortal words,”

And after meditation, there are dogs to be fed, the garden to be watered, emails to be answered, bills to be paid, laundry humming away in the wash basket, a gutter stuffed with dead leaves, menus to be devised, chores and  preparation for  community service, an hour of literacy teaching, another hour showing someone how to use MS Word on the computer, a friend’s birthday so I must  think about baking muffins or a lemon polenta cake, hoping it comes out better this time, sorting out tin cans and toilet rolls for recycling. All the while I compose opening paragraphs of fiction, practise snatches of dialogue, skim book reviews, jot down notes to myself. Monday morning, here you are again.

Had a disconcerting conversation with an old friend last night who said it is a pity I stopped drinking because she remembers me as a warm, funny and vivacious drunk. The problem was that I went from warm, funny, vivacious, etc, to dead drunk in a few hours, stopping en route for a little enraged, morose or maudlin. She might not remember that part, but I do and I remind myself — why we can’t drink, why we won’t drink. Grateful, grateful, grateful that I no longer need to drink. ‘Warm, funny and vivacious’  can wait for the real me to catch up. No more moods on tap.

Active concern

Coffee bitter, dogs snapping at one another’s noses, overflowing bath water, cheeping of a small house sparrow that has flown into the kitchen to peck at crumbs on the kitchen table. Tenor of a busy morning. And neighbours phoning at 6am to discuss impacted wisdom teeth or hernias with the housemate. The village wakes early.

I am surrounded by extroverts, but I remain an introvert. Maybe I’m a closet extrovert because I like chatting to friends, going out to buzzy restaurants and sitting in meetings waiting for my turn to speak, but I lack the sociable stamina of  the true extrovert. On the other hand I am not a wilting orchid, as described by Susan Cain in her new book Quiet: The Power of #Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, reviewed ambivalently by Jon Ronson:

Cain says we’re “especially empathic”. We think in an “unusually complex fashion”. We prefer discussing “values and morality” to small talk about the weather. We “desire peace”. We’re “modest”. The introvert child is an “orchid – who wilts easily”, is prone to “depression, anxiety and shyness, but under the right conditions can grow strong and magnificent”.

No, I have known those kinds of introverts and they tend to be a little too fond of their own company:  I am just someone who likes books and daydreaming, would rather go for a walk with a dog than a chatty human. The housemate and I had a 45-minute conversation before she left this morning to do community health work. I had not had any  strong bitter coffee yet and can’t recall a word of what we said. I agreed to to do something or other before some or other time. Is this ageing or just sleepiness?

There are chickpeas soaking in a large enamel bowl next to the sink. Bundles of squeaky fresh Swiss chard. On the kitchen table, next to the bread board, there is the notebook with scribbled  passages for a stuck novella. And a half-written letter to a friend who lives in Zambia and has no Internet. She sits and waits by the window to see the postman ride up the dusty farm road on his bicycle, waiting for the stamped and franked envelope with  familiar handwriting, as we all did once upon a time. I have no idea if my friend is an extrovert or introvert. Loneliness is just part of her given, nursing elderly parents, struggling with poverty and  hardship. We write to one another and warm our hands by the fire of words. She reads the great humanist thinker Erich Fromm and quotes this to me:

• Love is the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love.
• Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as s/he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his or her own sake, and in their own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
• To respect a person is not possible without knowing him or her; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.

What goes without saying

Bent over to kiss my giant dog’s silky black ear and squinked my back. It hurts.

Lime appassionata. The kitchen smells of lime zest and I have jugs of squeezed lime juice in the fridge. I am slowly getting around to making Key Lime Pie without graham crackers. I have never seen a graham cracker out here and my friend Jan says crushed digestive biscuits will work.

Per yesterday’s post, an email from a friend reminding me what Kay Redfield Jameson, suffering with bipolar illness, wrote in An Unquiet Mind:

The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description. I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that’s the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn’t say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living. He was terribly direct, which was terribly important, and he was willing to admit the limits of his understanding and treatments and when he was wrong. Most difficult to put into words, but in many ways the essence of everything: He taught me that the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still, but — with steely effort, the grace of God, and an inevitable break in the weather — that I could make it.

It may rain, so I must rally my lower back and go out to take washing off the lines. As I move around (gingerly) I practise snatches of dialogue from the latest fiction drafts. Patting the dog (gingerly). Trying not to think about the violence in Toulouse, the countrywide rioting here, the situation in Syria, the brutal death of young Trayvon Martin in Florida. In the back garden the bronze fennel is dying into gold, feathered stalks that hollow out and rustle in the wind.

Radical change

Shafts of sunlight piercing black cloud, such a dramatic landscape. Cold enough for a  small bowl of mundane but warming oatmeal porridge. Like my Scottish father, I eat it with  a little milk and salt. The housemate shudders. She grew up on soggy Kelloggs cornflakes with  plenty of sugar and milk.

While I was eating my porridge with salt and rubbing the dog’s head with my slippered foot, I read Benjamin Y Fong on Freud in the New York Times. Not a quick read.

[Freud] proposed that we engage in a particular kind of conversation that runs something like this: one person talks without worrying about whether his words are “right,” in the sense of their being both correct and appropriate, and the other listens without judging any disclosure to be more important than another. In contrast to most conversations, which have certain culturally-defined limits and rhythms of propriety, this exchange has no such rigid rules. It ventures to awkward places. It becomes too intense. And more often than not, it is utterly boring, reducing both partners to long bouts of silence.

From an outside perspective, the conversation is pointless. And indeed, most of the time it appears to be a waste. But in its disjunction with routine human interaction, it opens a space for our knotted interiors, so used to “having a point,” to slowly unravel. As each piece flakes off, it is examined and seen in relation to other pieces. After a long while, we gain what might be called, to borrow a term from Martin Heidegger, a “free relation” to these parts of ourselves and our world, such that the unmovable density they once comprised becomes pliable and navigable. Some key pieces appear and others vanish, but the puzzle is never complete. The aim of the conversation, however, is not completion, which short of death itself is an illusion, but the ability to change. This change involves neither the victory of the secondary process nor the liberation of the primary process but rather the opening of lines of communication between them.

When I first began going to meetings in draughty church halls and basements, I learned a great deal from the emphasis on honesty. And the same was true of therapy that first year sober. At first this seemed to me a matter of talking about what was usually hidden away or not disclosed. Secrets. And then about admitting the tapestry of lies that had masked the alcoholism, revealing what had really happened, what we really wanted, what we knew would show us in a bad light. Not telling the old lies, making a place for new and uncomfortable truths. Mine eyes have seen what my hand did.

But then, meeting after meeting, therapy session and session, I found that  truths emerged of which I had not been aware, that the truth was larger and deeper than just me and my habits of deceit or  honesty, that certain understandings and patterns of truth-telling or fabricating were shared by this recovery community, by other troubled women who had sat down in counselling. And  by those out in the workplace, in families, in churches and  sports clubs and the wider community. That when people say ‘Speaking truth to power’, it is not always empty rhetoric but a recognition that  truth and power are connected, that social conventions can be opened up and changed by telling the truth.

What Freud proposed, and what remains revolutionary in his thought today, is that human beings have the capacity for real change, the kind that would undo the malicious effects of our upbringings and educations so as to obviate the need for “breaks from real life,” both voluntary and involuntary.

Over the years I’ve listened to people in recovery tell their stories over and over again, admit ugly truths,  attempt to break free of shame by  saying what happened, move beyond  the stuckness of victimisation, acknowledging  responsibility in what went wrong, forgiving and/or forgetting,  grappling with old terrors, giving hope a chance. There’s no magic formula for change or recovery. The deep irrational drives that govern the unconscious mind resist rational understanding and resist change. We listen and do not understand what we are hearing. Our listening, like our speaking, is motivated by unrealistic expectations, wishing for miracles, hearing only what suits us, refusing  the parts of the narrative that don’t make sense. Wanting someone else to solve the problem for us, wanting them to make it all better, wanting the past to correct itself.

And yet every now and again,  there is a ‘light bulb’ moment and a window is flung open in an airless room. I remember my own  shift in understanding: it need not be this way for ever. And the listener who nodded and smiled, watching me change before her eyes.

A great pathos

Human Rights Day here, a public holiday commemorating the  horrible massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, in which police opened fire on unarmed protestors and shot many of them in the back as they fled. One of those  old bitter memories that haunts us even today in  another kind of nation. And it has been a grim and gritty week so far, a subdued, distressing funeral, rioting in neighbouring towns and major highways closed because of cars being stoned. Never mind, this too will pass.

In the evenings I have begun to reread Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James, curling up on the couch with a mug of  tea, a good lamp on the side table and a thick book on my lap. I will never tire of the company of Henry James, a magnificent novelist who somehow managed to write thinly masked fiction about all his social acquaintances and family without having the pants sued off him. They were more flattered than  outraged, quite an achievement.

Henry James: “Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”

He may have been kind, but very little escaped his attention. When we studied Portrait of a Lady in literature seminars years ago, the character of Isabel Archer was so sharp and true that  each of us could think of somebody we knew who was this character, a beautiful, passionate and  ambitious young woman eager to  choose her destiny and make a life for herself, unaware that her naivety and trusting innocence might be her downfall.

Because the man Isabel Archer will fall in love with and choose for a husband is the charming  entrepreneur Gilbert Osmond who will destroy her, quite casually and without remorse. We were all Isabel Archer once.

And on  my writers’ forums and mailing lists we go on debating  the question of how we self-censor, how we respect the privacy of those of live with us, those who would be outraged to find themselves  in published works, those who might come across their misbehaviours in a family member’s blog and feel cut to the quick. What we dare not write, what we should not write, what is forbidden or unwritable.

And how we find ways to tell our secrets, betray our nearest and dearest,  defy those who would stop us; how we tell the truth more fully, disrespectfully and provocatively. No easy answers. How I would like to write about that funeral! So uncomfortable an occasion with the mourners  crowded into the old worn pews, the  intrigues,  dissensions and genuine grief, the revelations when the will was read, the eulogy stuffed with diplomatic lies, the startling gossip outside the church — all the tricky, impossible, rich material bound up with human relationships. But, no, I cannot write a word.

Some day perhaps I may be able to tell a little of the story. And  grasp something of what lies behind the  drama and secrecy, the facts and rumours, to touch on  that core mystery of how we live and die, how we choose this and not that, how we recover or relapse,  fight on in vain or surrender and win. How we approach the deeper things, the paradoxes, the hidden realities and motivations.  This, from Marilynne Robinson:

“The notion that religion is intrinsically a crude explanatory strategy that should be dispelled and supplanted by science is based on a highly selective or tendentious reading of the literatures of religion. In some cases it is certainly fair to conclude that it is based on no reading at all…. In fact there is no moment in which, no perspective from which, science as science can regard human life and say that there is a beautiful, terrible mystery in it all, a great pathos. Art, music, and religion tell us that.”

Imagining her freedom

 

Bright hot Monday morning, agapanthus and  bronze fennel gone to seed and splitting pods all over the place, more autumn bounty.  I collect the dried fennel seeds in small brown paper bags, which I put down somewhere dry and safe, and then forget about. Sigh. Major highways closed because of civil unrest and rioting, burning blockades , protest marches, the stoning of cars.

To resist the easy fall into fear and hatred, to  search for ways forward that are not kneejerk reactions.

Putting out black clothes for a funeral, the prospect of a hot stuffy church filled with weeping family and friends. The smell of flowers in the church like a creeping sadness, acorns hitting the tinny roof of the old church, once Lutheran or Presbyterian, then Congregational, now United or Pentecostal. The minister as I recall is relentlessly optimistic and fond of overhead slides, bouncy choruses. But not a progressive church, the  black and Cape coloured servants and  labourers will sit together at the back, their presence a tolerated exception. The long black hearse out front, the oak trees turning brown against the blue skies, dead leaves thickening in gutters and ditches

Two hundred years ago, the town would have  had the same wide streets shaded with European oaks, fields planted up with vines, the same low homesteads under thatch, the same whitewashed churches. A God-fearing industrious emigrant community enjoying the prosperity built on slavery. Not much has changed.

Transformation hurts, change hurts. We give up safety to snatch at freedom like a stinging nettle.

An illuminating poem from Laura Kasischke:

At the end of the text, a small bestial form

This is the glimpse of the god you were never supposed to get.
Like the fox slipping into the thicket.
Like the thief in the night outside the window. The cool
gray dorsal fin in the distance. Invisible
mountain briefly visible through the mist
formed of love and guilt.

And the stranger’s face hidden in the family picture. The one

imagining her freedom, like

the butterfly blown against the fence
in her best yellow dress
by the softest breeze of summer:

To have loved
and to have suffered. To have waited
for nothing, and for nothing to have come.

And the water like sleek black fur combed back that afternoon:

The young lovers rowed a boat. The boy
reeled in a fish. The husband
smiled, raising
a toast.

While the children grew anxious
for dinner. While something
struggled under the water
bound by ropes.
And the warm milk dribbled down the sick man’s chin.
And the wife, the mother, the daughter, the hostess, and those
few people on earth she would ever
wish were dead
would be the ones she loved the most.

Five years

When I decided to get sober forever on 17 March 2007, I had no idea that thousands around the world were glugging down green beer and wearing  leprechaun hats. But here I am at five years and I’m not sure how I got here.

Except that I have had so much support, encouragement and insight from all my friends, especially those on the same journey of recovery. Thanks to every one of you who takes the time to read this blog and comment or email me.

The gratitude for this ordinary undramatic life I have now is unfaltering. I doubt the fear of financial insecurity will ever leave me because I don’t live in a prosperous country and there are few economic miracles for the poor and destitute amongst whom I live. There is generosity and dignity though, the difference between authentic and spurious suffering. And simplicity is a way of life that beats consumerism hands down.

For lunch I am making crostini with a tuna tapenade, from a handwritten recipe I found  at the back of a cookbook. Just canned tuna with a little sour cream, chopped olives and capers, salted anchovies, fresh thyme leaves and chopped Italian parsley, all mixed up or blended with lemon juice and  ground black pepper, heaped onto toasted slices from a baguette. We get  delicious bread here and the housemate is a good baker too. This time of year cured and salted olives are brought into grocers and  farmers’ markets from the Karoo, so we will have tubs of glistening green or black olives in brine to eat with winter lemons and limes.

We don’t have the custom of giving chips or medallions out here and it isn’t necessary. Sobriety is its own reward. I have never once in five years woken up and wished I had drunk alcohol the night before, never felt that getting sober was a waste of time. And on the whole staying sober has not been hard because I did not and do not want to go back to where I found myself in early March 2007.

And, oddly, looking back I don’t regret the lost years, their chaos and misery. Without those decades I might never have found compassion and kindness in such abundance, within myself and in others.

Antilamentation
By Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.