He has this other girl, he forgot about me

I'm in love with broken glass

---------------

She called me Kendria

Every day for at least three years she called me Kendria. I could have corrected her the first time, but I didn't. Just look at her shoulders -- 18, and life had crushed her. Most of it had to be the shyness, but the rest was her glasses. They were the biggest things in the room. Dark, round, and insanely out-of-place frames warping her frightened eyes: nobody likes me, they said.

We would go together along the cracked college sidewalks she used to walk alone. My energy was flying around like popcorn and I wondered if all the talk that I used to fill up the space between Economics and American Literature was just bubble gum to her. She was quiet and her smiles were few, but she smiled all the time for me. We walked from American Literature to the cafeteria. She liked peanut butter and jelly and ginger ale. That sounded so damn old. 

I pictured her as an only child, and late. Maybe she came from a household with flowered wallpaper and a very neat kitchen. Maybe her childhood was a soiled-apron, cardigan-sweater thing, with bathroom-scissor haircuts. 

Anyway, I was Kendria and I just let her think that. Kendria was her companion, and she was mine.

With no rain for weeks, people had begun to watch the sky. 

Tonight drops fell and fell and pounded dusty ground where thin plants had set their leaves down on the dirt to wait.

A laughing crackle of rain started with just one splash -- a keening piano key ringing in a dying room. 

Give me green and push me up. Drench me in reds and yellows. Beat against me with the sun above until I open, begging water from below.

Demons are crazy things worse than too many spirits and too much buzz. I want to love more. Sometimes I put the flame away, sometimes I want the fuze.

The sky caught fire under a popsicle sun and I would kill to see that again. Its beauty bled overhead in dying orange. Somewhere below dusk's pastels I moved the way tired people move through a gummy day, sucking on self-pity like candy.

I forget that we're here to love like we're on fire. We're gonna cry and hurt and beg and laugh at ourselves and grab a coffee and keep on living.

Take as much as we can.

Jam our pockets at the buffet.

Stuff our hearts, and walk out with our lips stained and souls bulging. This is all we get.

I have done it the wrong way.

I have sat in a room with a desert of books, picking at left-over cigarette butts and hoping I could scrape together a drag.

I watched out the window as more than ten months went by, and like a dead person without a voice I watched the leaves and the snow and the spring. The days swirled slowly around outside, dragging shadows on the floor.

Mom and dad. They knocked and pushed notes under my door. They loved me but that's where I was, stuck until I wasn't stuck.

Today while the guy behind me coughed and I craved a light and sweet, I realized that although I was in line at the coffee counter, my wallet was at home.

To Tell You The Truth

Some wishes are starving

never the doing, never the happy

you know, never the sun, never the blooming

………………

I was a kid in the sun with new shoes thinking about nothing but flavor and the next bite. I poured my heart into a triple scoop and knocked it off the cone. My heart blew apart. Glistening ice cream flattened to death on the blacktop.

Dad talked carefully. We would ask for a new scoop, but I was not the same girl as five minutes ago.

………………

From Me To You

It’s not a crush it’s gravity
love, but not heavenly
i wish that wishes came true
from me to you
………..

I’ve been bitching about writer’s block, but it’s not writer’s block, it’s a searing inability to reshape heartache by slapping it with words.
………..

She was in her fifties wearing too-tight jewely jeans with raging gems on her ass. Give me a gun or a blindfold, please.

They say, be honest. Pick up a pen and scratch it out in truths.

So, I am relying on the ink and the notebook tonight.

It's aggravating, but true.

I wanna scream and cry and break a few things.

It's Mine, So I Borrowed It:

Babe, do I know you?

do your kisses tingle like champagne?

got some love left for me?

dragging her hips

stirring the stew

walking past the gin and cigars

past beat up hearts

come in babe

do I know you?

-------------

He liked the licorice cigars. He lit them at a wooden table next to the jukebox, kicking his work boots on the chair. With coke in his blood and long-ago Vietnam in his heart he spit anger at the world. I was with him for years for the price of a few drinks and a motorcycle.

You collect strays, his friend had said to me.

Years later after his laugh was gone and the ground took him back, another friend asked me, why aren't you married? Let's be honest, you're almost 40 and you're a nice looking girl…

I said, I just never saw it that way.

----------------

The words are making me angry, hiding their beautiful lilts and whorls.

Messy thoughts on a Monday.

----------------

I held you till my fingers raw,

sunk in

I wanted you wanted you

in a bloody way

but a dreamer's hooks are always empty

----------------

I have erased so many things tonight in a struggle to rub words together right -- I am not feeling it, that's all.

A saxophone train screams

it's that kind of night

I'm sitting here wishful

__________

I drove to the liquor store under a marbled sky steeped in sunset. Later, I was going to find love on paper with a Cabernet in my hand. The words have to be perfect. They are never perfect.

She tipped her chin in the sunlight and dark hair brushed her back.

The light is like butter, I said.

Will that make me yummy? she asked.

A curl, tired of being a curl, loosened across her shoulder. Shining eyes looked up and down at me.

Wait, I said. Look a little lower and only with your eyes, but don't move your head. Pale light washed her skin and a flash behind frosted her hair. She was a dream of shadows and eyelashes that deepened my trust in models bursting in a beautiful pose.

For What It's Worth

A heartache moon hung over me

I see you in dreams

that's me, I don't do it easy

you taste beautiful

I do it hard

I love you

it's like begging for things

why do it easy?

you kill my sleep

I do it hard

For what it's worth

I'll throw a penny for you

in the well for you

-----------------

I admit to making things up sometimes built with the heart of fury torn from real things inside.

The writing is hard lately as I run low on disguise and Band-Aids.

Either Lily loves the spring or she has gone nuts. She can't walk along like a boring average dog and twitch her ears at passing cars. She lunges and whines. I leaned down today to get a better grip and heard her teeth slam together as she snapped at a passing pick-up. What are you going to do if you catch one Lily?