everything is damp here, and
where the dying leaves settle
the path is slick on old
stone sidewalks cobbled;
a reminder of a day past.
happiness as two steps
at a time were taken
landing, sliding,
skinning palms and knees
through jeans ripped
stained bloody;
portent of a marriage
ending and a heart
never quite mending.
in winter, the dying
leaves of autumn rot,
not just here, but there
where I existed too long.
sorrow sits, nestled in
her palms outstretched
tinging a life of walkabouts
and yester-morrows
My little ‘hood in East Dallas was sandwiched between one of million dollar homes and a ghetto I didn’t like to drive through alone. We were mostly middle class? Lower middle class? Monetarily thrifty? Just people with jobs who settled in to a place we could almost afford, or older residents who had purchased new and were nearing death.
When I first moved in, the house on the furthest corner near where I wouldn’t drive, caught fire. Curious, many of us flocked over only to see firemen pulling plants out of a smoldering garage.
When helicopters were seen, we’d wonder if they were traffic or police. We called them all Ghetto Birds. Around holidays, weekends, and the random weekday, we’d hear loud pops and wonder if it was guns or fireworks. Flat tires were common from the foot-deep potholes and ruts. We knew each other, closely and loosely, wondered and gathered randomly, share food and woes. Some came, some went, some stayed, one or two caused havoc.
I woke up missing my house, the yard, space to dwell. It wasn’t much, the gentrification was encroaching by the time I sold, but it was mine and the people I knew were true.
For a long time, I thought we are all ruled by Karma, but no matter how much I tried to be good and true so that only good would come back to me, shit has always seemed to happen, often tides of it. All at once. One after the other. Randomly out of the blue.
Concurrently, I thought Murphy’s Law seemed more applicable: if it can happen, it will happen. My mother’s birth father was a Murphy though, so it seems reasonable to add ‘and it always happens to a Murphy’.
Lately, my thoughts wander to Sisyphus, rolling that boulder up that hill for all eternity. The moral is that he’s supposedly happy. Unlike Sisyphus, the struggle is not enough to fill my heart. I find it exhausting. Physically. Emotionally. Intellectually.
Sisyphus was really a dumb fuck. Was the path up the mountain so narrow he couldn’t step aside, let the boulder go, destroy someone else’s life?
the nearer I am to ether, the
less consumed am I with those
there already, or lovers past, passions
connecting to an eternal
other;
wrapped in self
contemplations less fragmented
but prefer the resonance of
my own deep breaths
rattling in my chest
When I first bought my house in Texas, it was May. I’d sit at the kitchen table with the back door open, watching my girls in the doorway watching the rain, turning to look at me in wonder every few moments. They had played wild every moment since the fence went up, no leash tethered from my wrist to their harness.
I wanted to open the door today and watch the rain here in Portugal, but it isn’t the same. There’s no green grass out the window, only cobblestone roads and neighbors that live too close.
The day is just gray, no sweet girls to observe, to adore.