The Banquet

I cannot be one with myself
And still be with you.
I cannot be in two places
At once.

I do not have three eyes to see from.
My third eye remains sealed,
For pain is forthcoming.

‘Five times the glory’ is the echoing phrase
I do not hear being shouted across the chasms.

I said six, not sex
And it was seven times, anyway.

And we ate and were merry
But only nine glasses were raised.
The tenth and eleventh were shattered with care
By the twelfth which belonged to a knight worth remembering.

I threw down my glass and threw up my hands,
And shouted across the table.
I shouted and cursed despite his angry face,
Made comical by thirteen years of neglect and ignorance.

Books are my Timeline

I’ve got my torn up copy of Les Mis hashed in half
Stashed in the pocket of the car I had in high school
Your Anne of Green Gables read to a baby girl wrapped in blankets
She was my first.
The picture books start from Maynard, stories still tied up from childhood,
Dedicated to the children I have now.

The thirty books in thirty days mark the ways
I tolerated living the shelter life
My way of rebuilding the library I left behind.
When it all was still fresh in my mind.

I’ll question your spending ten dollars on a t-shirt,
But twenty dollars in books,
It’s just 20 in food for my heartstrings.
If I’m an addict it’s to the cause of filling my shelves
With a legacy, my gift to posterity
Like Dad’s copies of Dr. Seuss he’s passed to me for safe keeping.

My cookbooks mark my days as a house wife,
My shelf of poetry builds as my friends grow during my single-life
I got a row of my colleagues, children’s authors now famous,
My Nemeses or something to shoot for?

If you can’t tolerate the clutter, I suggest you head for the door.
Books are my timeline which I go by
Of the places I been that I can’t revisit again.
They mark my place.

Friend

At the times when I feel the most
That I want to do some human disfiguration, self-maiming –
The opposite of preservation
You are there.
And you remind me why not to
Without the need of saying anything at all.

And at the times when I feel there’s an elephant sitting on my chest
And I haven’t done the required number of push-ups
That would give me the strength to lift it away,
I realize you are that strength.

And at the times when I feel I’ll just have to keep living in this pain today,
You insist on taking it all away.
Without the need of saying anything at all.

But you do say something.
You say to me, I love you.
With all of your listening.
And though I may wonder why you do,
It is enough that I know you do.