Girl Named Captain

October 31, 2009
Footnotes.

I cut a thin blade down the center -
two completely separate lives.
I want to believe she won’t do it again
but she netted me with lies.
So I carry two soft strokes for the next one,
smart enough not to give away a third.
And when her replacement betrays me the same,
I will hold onto my one last tenderness for someone who really deserves it.
But here is where she’s tricked me,
the freeform whore.
No one will ever earn it, having been burned too many times,
having built and rebuilt expectations and hoops.
I will turn you all away,
no second impressions.
She will keep her guilt as a blanket for the rest of the winter season,
but when summer comes, she will reveal herself again,
and move on.

October 28, 2009
“I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”
— Walt Whitman

October 16, 2009
poetry as tonic, #7

psychotherapy:

I Have News for You

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood

and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures irrecoverable

and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings

do not send their tuberous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives

as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;

and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
unpacking the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,

who do not yearn after love or fame or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;

Thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.

Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.

I have news for you:
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room

and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

- Tony Hoagland