Tag: mourning

Poems

The Cats Who Loved Me

I miss the two cats who

loved me deeply.

I tried my best to do the same

for them and I believe I loved them

deeply as well.

They’re gone now.

They’re both dead.

And I live alone.

I talk to them still from time

to time.

Empty voices in a wooden house.

I feel them here with me.

Or want to feel them here.

Or need to feel them here.

Maybe you’ve had a pet or

a lover or a loved one before

who’s no longer there;

either deceased or moved on?

Maybe you can relate to this

kind of vacant feeling?

And maybe, just as I,

you still hope and believe

in something…

because you have been loved

bigly.

Poems

There Again

I won’t go there again.
I won’t.
It will be avoided.
I hate it.
I don’t like having to avoid
a place,
but I will.
The road you live on won’t
exist in my world.
I won’t go by your house
hoping and dreaming and
angry
late at night.
Looking at your window,
knowing the mass of coiled
gold hair mess behind it.
I can’t.
I’ll choose emptiness and
also fullness with strangers,
with the moonlight above
country fields near our town
cuz it is late and I’m lonely
and I drove out there to
breathe the scent of oak trees
instead.
I want your scent, body heat,
curves, accidental brush
of soft skin and your
muffled snores.
Sometimes I’ll blow coke,
lots of it,
and it will comfort me,
a hall of poets and angels
gathered.
But some other nights I won’t.
Sometimes I’ll just lay still
in my bed with the watercolor
painting of midnight on the
walls,
feel my passionate heartbeat,
strong and rigorous but also soft,
and I’ll just be still,
knowing stillness in night
while awake
is sacred.
Us ushering ourselves to the
hall of death.

I want to be tough, but more
importantly,
I want to be honest.
So I will.
That is how I’m going to live.

Poems

A Bath When Sad

The bath when sad
reminds me of the last day
my cat was alive.
I bathed in ablution
before I went to put him
to sleep.
Afterwards, when I got home
to the empty house
I bathed in ablution again
and cried and cried.
Then I remember how
5 minutes after I had put him
to sleep,
out in the parking lot of the vet,
my partner at the time
argued with me about
when would I be showing up
to hangout with her and her girls
that night.
I remember that feeling;
complete disbelief and despair
that she would argue with me,
care about needing to know
such a thing, there in that moment,
in such a raw and tender moment,
the lifeless body of my 17 year old
cat laying right before us
wrapped in a towel
in the trunk of my car
… and then,
I get more sad.

Now —
The cat is gone.
She is gone.
Her girls are gone.
The cat is a spiritual presence
for me still, an everlasting being
and feeling of love.
She is something I don’t want
to remember, but still do
in lots of hurtful ways.

Poems

The Water You Last Drank From

The water you last drank from
remains
by my bed.
I will leave it there
as I let go of you
over this next season of my life.
It will evaporate,
turn to air,
and travel very far from here
over the next million years.
And that was
always going to happen to us
as well.
Though it was quite miraculous
how the infinite configurations
placed us together in this
infinite ocean,
soul to soul,
body to body,
soft skin lain on soft skin
in morning sunshine,
vaporous breathing to the
heavens
where once upon a time
you had reached for
that water you last drank from
for the final time
in the aftermath of something,
something riveting, tumultuous,
healing, and laid bare for
the other to see.

I see now and look over at
what will be gone soon,
what will be gone as Autumn
and the hearth fires start up
again.

Poems

My Forests & My Wizards

My forests and my wizards
lead me in my days.
The living network
and the Dead.
My days are bound before
the sunshine’s chords,
the spirit clouds,
the respirations of oaks.
The calls, the draws,
herald my fate,
their listenings and their vibrations,
become my tongue,
my way, my steps forward.
My heart is like the forest’s roots
and my breath is the endless vapor
of the unliving,
their expanse across all time,
it shapes and fills my
now-woman body,
and rings my now-woman soul.
These curves
do the work
they were meant to do
… thanks to their conception
from the woods,
the lichens,
and the moss
as my ghost loves
hummed on.