Turn key
Open door
Close door
Lock it
Clean up
Homework
Thaw meat
Cartoons
Stop stupid!
Slap face
Fuck you!
Black skillet!
Door squeaks
Wipe tears
Still stupid!
Hey mama!
Turn key
Open door
Close door
Lock it
Clean up
Homework
Thaw meat
Cartoons
Stop stupid!
Slap face
Fuck you!
Black skillet!
Door squeaks
Wipe tears
Still stupid!
Hey mama!
Silence holds the family in pieces.
It’s the brutality of blessings
that splinters all to avenues of frost
and the unseemly snowy wood.
When hush is broken by some tired soul,
we melt and pour ourselves into convenient sewers.
Thirsty for the ocean and thirsting for a new beginning.
I have a lot of poems that I love but this one poem is my life. I think it’s many people’s lives. Living is not always an easy thing to do, but if you hold on to the truth that you are, indeed, the master of your fate and the captain of your soul, you can weather all things.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
I am not allowed
to split you open
climb inside you to
learn your secrets
I must maddeningly deduce
Negotiate with sensitivities
Navigate around trigger lines
My skin — camouflage
My hair — bush
My eyes — ink
My mouth — contort
I talk to myself out loud
so that my heart knows it’s me — not
some mad woman caught
in the wilderness of a lover’s secrets.