hospital poem
Institutions.

My life has touched on every single one of them, in some way and with regularity. Hospitals, shelters, centres (always ?centres? because more descriptive terms may make it easier for others to know what you are really hiding) funeral homes, anywhere where people take over your life and run it for you for a little while until you can take over again.

Institutions and caretakers.

People we have very short intense relationships with, people who take responsibility for your body and your mind for a while, then fade quickly out of your life again; you don?t even always remember their names. You don?t need to. They don?t remember you either. It?s fine.

Rest stations, coffee breaks, nap time.

Anticipating these pauses is futile and irresponsible. They remind us not that we are alive, but why we are alive.

Everything else is memory.

Guelph Lake
The water is really warm for the first three inches below the surface, and beneath that lies cold currents and sharp, greasy rocks.
I forgot I could float.
A deep, deep breath and my natural body fat enable me to coast along on this green lake, with just my tits, toes and nose above the surface. My ears can only hear a weird, atonal hum, like bass pressure, and it sounds wonderful.
A fish swam by. I said hello. I said hello back to myself in the fish's voice. I do that a lot. I get along very well with uncommunicative life forms.
A little yellow bird came down and bathed itself by the rocks. Paula swam over to me and pointed him out. My glasses were tucked down deep inside between my bathing suit and my belly so all I saw was a yellow blur of motion, and i laughed along with her.
She wears a lifejacket; she's afraid of water, and I'm trying to teach her to swim, in return for my driving lessons. I never push people, which is why she's still wearing the lifejacket. It's more than good enough that she's trying. Patience has become a more comfortable virtue for me, this last year. I seem to have an inexhaustible resource of it. I like that.
Part of patience is practice though, and I see her floating there next to me. On my back, I take a deep breath and my toes pop up, all pale and happy. My head at her feet, I reach over and gently clasp her ankle, and after a moment, she holds mine.
We float like that, and it's sparkling on the water, quiet in my head. The sun bounces off of my nose; I'll have so many more freckles tomorrow that I'll look like an Irish stereotype. That's okay; I'm Irish.
Small patches of my skin are warmed, the sink below the water as I let out breath. They're warmed and dry again as they resurface into this glorious August day. The metaphor gets a little heavy, so I drop it.

I can tell there'll be a thunderstorm tonight from the clouds and the encroaching thickness in the air. It's inevitable.
We float like that for ten minutes, an hour, eternity. I think about everyhting and nothing and between, and a bug lands on my nose, apprising its new landscape.
My face, my skin. Things I can't change. I blow the bug off my nose; things I can.

We make an old, inside joke, break apart, swim over to a floating picnic table that someone has considerately thrown in the water. We laugh, we play.
I don't want to leave but there is a time for everything and we do. On the drive home the air becomes so thick in the car that I lean my head and dawdle my arm outside the window, catching air.

The storm tonight will please me. Water is movement. I smile a lot on the way home.

radiolight
eyes closed stretched out on your bed
which is small, but very comfortable
i catch a glimpse of plastic, smell of boy.

when you say it moves you, i know you are right, i know you are honest

it is strange to be surrounded by so many familiar things in an unfamiliar environment.
and no matter what time of day it is, your bed bathed in radiolight.
communicating through impulse and emotion, not awkward words,
not comfortable phrases,
in body music.
these things we share; we should share them through the tubes, through the electric currents,
it's wrong for us to keep them to ourselves.

it's wrong for us to hide this frequency. but the temptation is too strong;
the heat and binary light
universal constants through our own two-band radio.

our parts a perfect fit;
we were made for each other.

coffee cup s.o.s.
saturday?s coffee
became pieces between my fingers.
I tore ?help me? from the styrofoam and meticulously formed the letters on the floor
there were small deposits of sugar and swallow
there were uncooperative floor tiles.

They keep it freezing in here.
I can tell it?s warm and windy outside
the kind of day when the sun turns its face away from you for a minute, and you feel the unwelcome advance of her cold moon upon your thigh.
Deceptively beautiful.
that?s what my mother used to say.

There?s this bed.
And some blankets
and someone in it,
but not me.

I?m off somewhere trying to figure you out
the fact that I care at all about it is what makes me crazy.

The effort?s something else entirely.

Between trying to understand and caring about the answer,
you live in my head more than I do.

inchoate
this woman is paid to talk to me
i'm afraid to show any love or hate

the room is flourescent, inchoate inarticulate
fear of something and yes, sisterhood-
the roar of sterilized machinery
hums there is no other lover

i felt something large detach
from inside, tender and someplace
I think of often and have never seen
and i raised my eyes to the
collective unconscious to catch it
as it flew, i said, i'm sorry

it hurt so much i thought i was dying
no one said a word; the silence was so eerie as I stood up to go lie down
i couldn't walk without tears

this is the room full of
whispers, where ugly green makes us feel like strangers.
separate from each other.

this blood isn't my blood
but I did make it, with phone calls,
and with orange juice and Tylenol I'll fix it
i fix everything.

nobody knew what i was doing that day
until I came home and slept two days, woke up, rolled over, started screaming.

frantic phone calls, bundled up in blankets by others, morphine next and it buzzed.
still afraid to ask for help from anyone.
still afraid of what i'd done.

someone else's words followed me for days like sticky insects
this is the room with the wolfmother wallpaper
this is the room with the wolfmother wallpaper

and i knew it was true but i couldn't see it.
it happened.
was over.
i do not think it affected me,
yet, one year later i find i do not know myself at all anymore.
other things have happened since, bigger, more painful and
i am taking back my body; it's hard, the hardest thing i've ever done
almost

i can only touch myself with someone else's hands.