where you can’t find me

Poem: where you can’t find me

It is easy with you
All the places you’ve been offended
Where you haven’t been treated right
A bike shop
Food co-op
Coffee shops
Restaurants

It’s easy to hide my physical body
Where you can’t find me

But what of my mind and heart

You always feel it when I go

I go to the Beloved
I give up
I cast myself into the abyss
Grief, denial, loss, bargaining, abandonment, hopeless grief
I throw myself over the cliff
Over and over
I resist
And then let go

It’s not wings
Because the cliff is a waterfall
I don’t want wings
And the Beloved laughs

Wings form
I refuse to fly
I won’t I won’t I won’t
I fall towards the water

Each time I wonder
If this time the Beloved will not shift
I hit the water

Safe again
Scales and tail
And I can breathe

And swim free
To the sea

Sea of Love

Poem: Sea of Love

I go in the sea
of dreams
open the chest
the trunk
the saddlebags
Empty the dirty laundry
Of emotion
On the floor
Grief and joy
Fear and hope
Mine
All mine

There is a place
Beyond words
I see you in that place
It is very old
And very young
It is so frightening to go there
Lose words
The first time
It is haunted and hunted


Are you aware
Of that place
Do you go there
Of your own volition?
Or do you struggle
Fight and suffer in the
Choppy boundary between air and water
Fear drowning
Water surrounds you
Above you too
You are in the wordless place
Over your head
Are you too deep?

Open your eyes
In the green water light
A mermaid waits to lead you
To a rope to a raft
And me

But first you must open your eyes

vast

Sometimes emotions are vast. I do not think our culture deals with grief very easily. Grief then becomes a vast pit, stuffed inside us. I sent the Falling Angels poems to friends and family. One older friend said that the poems were too sad and was I that sad all the time?

I replied, no, I am not sad all the time. The sadness is in the poems because there are very few people that I know that are comfortable with sadness and grief. So I put it in to poetry, because I do not want to stuff it. We need to let grief come out and let the tears flow and let it go.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: vast.

trilogy

The Lady Ox trilogy

The first poem in this trilogy was written in 1984. The next two were written twenty years later. Like ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.

The first poem popped into my head while I was thinking about flowers. The second two were both problem poems. Most of my poems are problem poems: I sit down with a problem that I am working on and start writing about it. I do not know where the poem is going to go and I am always surprised. And it often goes somewhere that I don’t expect. Often it is a map for where I aspire to go emotionally, but usually I am not there yet when I finish the poem.