Ebb Tide at the Dark of the Moon
Not angry
Not believing any more or less of you than that you are human
and that I am stupid
to start believing
I could ever have a home.
That remissions are any more than interludes between treatments
but mostly that any HOME could ever be for me.Tape hurts more to remove when its sticky,
And this is a Brazilian of my heart.
You asked nothing of me
Except the friendship I so willing brought
Knowing you a brother from my past
You would give me safety in this life
and I would re-aquaint you with the meanings from your last.
And when I didn’t die as expected you said it still could be my home
This room duplicated, decorated from my many decades dreamtime
sanctum.
The first nine months I waited for the punchline
For the other shoe to drop, so close to bolting so many times
Riding through your dark periods of miasma angers and broken glass
“Please don’t leave,” you begged
So I didn’t. And therein my fatal flaw, I wanted what I couldn’t have
a home
and attached.
Your friendship followed through my days
like the crow triskell plastic decal on the sidedoor window
The heat of love not measured in ties of bank account or sexual attraction
began to
melt the cold glass walls I favor
and I forgot
the lesson of high tides full swell and gentle
and I let hope deposit kinship shells on my previous desolate beach.
Don’t get me wrong, my beach is not unique, all beaches lie desolate again each stormy tide.
Between I love my children so much that knowing my craziness and their embarrassment I keep the distance they set and store up all my mother memories in the rocky shoal caves beyond the reach of destroying tides.
And I have friends
Unimaginable wonderful magic friends
Best friends
I love and I am loved
Beyond measure and dreams.
But before this misstep, I had always remembered
I was the misfit toy
and
Everything ends
and
Everyone leaves.
In life
We don’t get what we deserve, we just get what we get
and I chose to make sand castles
and jump over the moon
but you said
land here
its safe
its home
its yours as long as you need it.
Believe in a postcard life.
I bought the straw dream
and began building, while wolfish you watched.
I have slept in the room with Damsels and Knights and a four poster bed
Kept my books in tall white shelves purchased with kindness
for eleven months
Like Frost’s Hired Man come home
Only Arizona has stayed cloudless on the orbish moons
and so against medical advice
I have also lived
24 hours and a few well faked orgasms trump friendship in your game.
Only that really isn’t fair,
You have been nothing but outwardly kind.
and said that you told her she would just have to deal with it
(when did I become “it” instead of “her”?)
as you left your hat on my chair for the first time in a year
and used the breadboard you bought me for my fifty-third birthday
as a tray to bring her breakfast coffee
and cruelly laughed at my expense with her within earshot.
“Does he really care at all about me, about our friendship?” the pain body whispers, “are his kindnesses only another way to bolster ego, manage image,
another version of the hateful foster family who paraded me to their friends to show their Christian might?”
To bury myself in the addiction of bitter anger,
allow me again to dance gleeful in the straw and sand and rain of this hurricane.But I know better
I face the leering body of her pain in mask of hate
I observe it and know better
and choose of course to leave.
I want to cry
get high
die
have someone hold me till all the echoes of all the partings and betrayals silence in my brain.
I do none of these.
I walk along the beach in the pelting, whips of rain
And Maybe tomorrow I’ll again wear my perfect pink galoshes.
CC