indifference

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neglecting the words

fail to attend to them properly

turning habitual is this lack of care

carelessly distant from fingers typing

remiss in stopping to write

omitting my performance as creator

disregarding          deferring my crafting techniques

Is the difference small           unnoticeable

expression of good intentions fall short

ignoring hints       suggestions       lessons of experience

My failure at maintaining a pattern of birth.

 

fine (day 30)

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They used to say,

you look like that girl from Dirty Dancing.

Maybe she should be me and I can be her.

She’d be sitting on a park bench with that cowboy from Pure Country.

Driving home, they’d listen to the odd musings of a taxi driver played by

Batman Returns fat flightless bird and nemesis.

She’d take that cowboy home and stand outside her door

searching for lost keys, being spied on by a crazy neighbor resembling the

White Witch of Narnia.

I’d watch it, wondering why time shifts so inconsistently wondering if

Quentin is pushing buttons in the editing room…

The Working Class

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The Month of Poetry is winding down…hard to believe I only have two more posts.  I am truly excited to be able to say I met this challenge and succeeded.  It proves that I can maintain a writing goal…

Sadly, this week also marks my official return to the classification of working stiff.

I joined the ranks of the unemployed in October 2012.  My husband and I relished these moments, having never truly had them since we began working for ourselves in November 1999.  After almost six months off, I am ready to get back to work…even if it is only for a few months.  SWP starts in July and it marks my final semester of graduate coursework and I pray that I can start teaching in August.

Working through the job choices is a bit more challenging though.  I accepted an online teaching/tutoring position with a Parker, Colorado company making really good money.  I appreciate it because I am an independent contractor, responsible for my own hours as well as the level of work I wish to complete.  This will be handy during SWP when I don’t have time for a regular 9-5 job.  It also gives me that extra boost of resume credit since my teaching experience has been limited to Early Childhood Education.

And it’s online…enough said…

Monday, I head in to fill out paperwork for Job A.  Job A pays only $1.00 more than my online tutoring position, but the location sits 5 blocks from my home and is ranked as one of the top three programs in the state of Colorado.  This position entails supervising an infant classroom, but the position doesn’t truly start for another week.  If I cannot secure a position as an Administrative Member, then I would only want to go back to my first love…cuddling with babies!!!  I am slated to replace the retiring INS (Infant Nursery Supervisor), so it is a slow transition.  I was apprehensive about this at first – I wanted to get started, dive in.  But a higher power was intervening…

Job B pays $3.00 more than my tutoring position, but requires me to take on the responsibility of operating a facility in  Northglenn.  The owner has had issues with Directors, so Tuesday I head in to meet the staff and get to know the program.  My employment, although paid, is considered trial – I work for one week to see if I like it and whether or not they like me.  When my trial period ends, Job A begins…

At this point, I can make a decision as to where I want to be.  Money does play a part, but I can’t see myself working someplace for an amazing wage when I hate my co-workers, clients and work environment.  I pray by May 12th I’ve made the right decision…

I just pray it doesn’t affect my writing…I have a manuscript to finish…

translations (day 28)

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She skipped a step

                Somewhere in between

Unsure where she fumbled the pace

Treading lightly, movement predicted

   by rhythm and pace.

She wishes to withdraw the intervention.

Advance              recede 

   Gravely phasing her mind into emptiness.

Nothing more than a short distance between

   Toes and love and lies and socket and machinery

                And the rung of a ladder.

She wants to measure it all.

periphery (day 27)

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The margins bleed and cry curses at my ignorance.

They swell beyond the wasteland,

fluctuating into spaces unchartered by their emptiness.

Margins,

confused by my careless whims,

mutiny against creative hemispheres.

Lines looking for orderly arrangements

curves and columns

erect                     pride                     predictable.

Deviation seen as limitation,

shoving margins around

statements shouting domestic violence

and pushing back against the measurements programmed.

snickers (day 26)

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I chose to post the piece I read at last night’s Women of Naropa…

 

 

He picks at lips, puckered like fish kissing the glass of an aquarium.  His nose twitches as he sniffs and blows with little notice to the rhythm and tempo he’s created.  He gathers his lids closed, pressed tightly together as deep wrinkles spread from the edges like tails.  He rubs his head as a distraction and breathes deeply to alleviate the tightening…

 but it never works.

It’s better than the time he rolled his eyes around in his head like gumballs dropping from those vortex candy machines.  He grunted and barked during those long months too.  People pointed and gawked.

One kid sat in line and talked about him as if he wasn’t there…

I feel so sorry for him.  My parents thought I had the same thing wrong
‘cuz I twitched all the time but it turned out to be ADHD.

I wanted to fucking knock the little bastard out.
Smash his teeth in so that all he had to worry about was a speech impediment.
I wanted to give him an excuse to talk about someone else other than my son.

I go through the spiel

If they can’t accept you for who you are

then they aren’t worth having as friends.

I may believe this line, but at his age a social life is everything and parents don’t know shit.

A kid in class badgered him about the twitching and sniffing and blinking and grunting and panting and coughing and gasping and picking and twitching and sniffing and blinking and gasping and panting and coughing. 

My son snapped.

I have Tourettes! And I can’t stop!  Can you stop a sneeze????

It hurts to watch him sometimes.

 

he’s my                                          (neck jerk with grunt)

dying smoke detector

chirping complaints                (squeaks)

tics set off by stress

he’s my                                          (hacking)

broken record

skipping cycles                           (huffing)

repetitions engrained in his misfiring brain.

a succession                                (sniffing) 

series                                              (eye roll and neck jerk)

sequence                                       (any tic)

It physically hurts me like it hurts him and all I can do is hug him and rub his shoulders and stroke his hair and pray that it disappears when he sleeps.

We’ve sat and watched hours of documentaries where a kid on the screen has it worse and we tear up and thank God that he’s not as bad as that kid.

Thank you Lord that I don’t have to have

wires put into my brain to make the twitches stop or

drugs that make me fat and sleepy and hungry and suicidal.

Thank you God that I don’t say cuss words in public and slap walls. 

So we tell his teachers each year why he has to wander back and forth at the back of the room, pacing like a caged animal at the zoo.  No meds for his compulsive crap.

He jokes about that

I can be a bitch. 

I can be a diva.

He likens himself to the Snickers commercial where the guys are driving and the crabby ass in the backseat is Aretha Franklin…

until he eats the peanutty chocolate treat.

I wish a Snickers would fix my kid.

words (day 25)

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Another cento poem…

 

In the beginning there was YOU–there will always be YOU, I guess.

In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me/

Thirsting for

stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.

This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to

whisper like a buttercup.

I never caused a thought of gloom.

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing.

The low yellow,

the poet like an acrobat.

 

 

 

Lines for the Fortune Cookies – Frank O’Hara

somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond – E.E.Cummings

Skunk Hour – Robert Lowell

What Were They Like? – Denise Levertov

Anywhere Out of the World – Charles Baudelaire

Anna Who Was Mad – Anne Sexton

I Am the Only Being Whose Doom – Emily Jane Bronte

Elegy For Jane – Theodore Roethke

Haiku (The low yellow) – Jack Kerouac

Constantly Risking Absurdity – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

torn (day 24)

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shouting demands at feverish pitch

she shuts off her mind and fumes.

that churning spot of heat within her gut,

she feels it spinning endlessly into her chest.

it’s about the canniblistic challenges

the ones that dissect her whole into parts

the ones that leave her floundering

with blinded eyes and a gaping hole in her head.

she feels the strain

the shredding separation between their hearts

and she’s done nothing to warrant the division.

she find herself wondering where this deep seeded

desire to please comes from

and why she feels split in two.

she wishes that he could see that he is the scalpel

and she the patient.

enigma (day 23)

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She shattered back against diving

expectations

You can’t make me identify

I won’t be identical.

She tired of faking reality

reality graffitied with perpetuated silence.

You can’t make me respond

I won’t belong.

She walked backwards through

the crowds

Her head tipped to the sky.