Royaboya's Beautiful Useables

Still sick...although I slept all night without waking up, and managed to do some laundry and a few dishes! yay... I've been watching a lot of Bill Maher, and am trying not to feel depressed, like the entire country is going downhill.

A fellow etsian is having a poetry contest on her site - Pheakkey.etsy.com - so these are gonna be my submissions. They are not particularly recent poems. I can't find any of my recent poems - no idea where the last three years of my writing life has gotten too.


1.

I'm having trouble focusing. All the clouds. All the
sky. They tore down the trees by the golf course.
When I drive by I think that this is what they always
feel like, the people in the Midwest. So I turn my neck
slightly to see the comforting shadow of a palm tree.
Those are my trees. They suddenly appear overnight
in hotel parkinglots and we, who live here, laugh and
spend 25 cents on another postcard. I can feel the palm
frond shadows on my neck. Your finger shadows too.
Spread and wide and orange. They are the most beautiful
hands I've ever seen. They wrap all the way from my ear
down to my collar bone and suddenly --sky, all that sky--
and you take my chin, it feels like climbing. My feet cling
to whatever's solid. My arms grab on and pull. To another
scene like a postcard. I'll put a quarter in the jar and we'll
go to Europe someday. Your hand on my neck while the
plane takes off. We'll be tilted back and climbing. I'll hold
my breath and think sky -- all that sky.

2.

we were like a pair-
beat galoshes in a puddle.
one is not enough.



3.

my mom asked me today, what i wanted from my grandmother's house.
I asked for the nutcracker, the one with the broken arm.
I'd take care of it. It's packed now, in a green plastic box.
Waiting for Christmas. It doesn't know yet that everything has changed.