Out of the Circle Game

Sometimes I wonder
if you ever think of me
while you float there
in your own stream of misery.
I’ve been in your place
and, boy howdy, I found
that floating faced up
will beat face-downed.

I came by this knowledge
quite honestly, you see,
as I cruised the banks
of the River Woe-Is-Me,
hoping to go under
at least one time around
on this circular stream where
my feet touched no ground.

And so much of that time
I thought of you and me,
face-to-face, back-to-back
and individually.
And that’s when I discovered
this persistent sound
of only one heart beating, since
I was the only one around.

I realized that even together,
we’d never be a We.
And my toe then touched bottom,
I don’t think coincidentally.
So I opted to wade ashore,
exhausted by the round and round.
Decided to share this story,
‘cause in for a penny in for a pound.

Now when I lie, to tell you the truth,
my lying is done with verity,
not supine in water, veritas-laced vino
nor even in psychotherapy.
I still think of you, though no longer
around your finger I’m wound.
I just wonder if you’d let me know,
when finally with peace you’ve been crowned.

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What Are Friends For?

If I needed you,
would you respond to my call?
If I called to you,
would you even care at all?
If you asked me to,
would I have the gall
to stand back
and just watch you fall?

These are questions
whose answers are moot,
the responses academic,
since I gave myself the boot,
a swift kick in the teeth
or, more likely, the glute.
But what more can you expect
from a depressed old coot?

So forget all these questions,
I should’ve just kept quiet.
I’ll just bury this feeling,
lest it incite a cry-it riot.
I’m pretty sure the moral —
unspoken but clear — don’t deny it,
is if I really wanted a friend,
I’d find a dog and buy it.

This is one of those “Jump into the thicket and see what you come out with (if you can) on the other side” poems. I came out with tortured rhymes, a Freudian cleansing of the subconscious psyche and a typical Hesch ending. Glad I left out the allusion to that old Iggy Pop and the Stooges song in the final verse. (You’d had to have been there on the cusp of the ’60s-’70s to get that.)

No Boundaries: To Those Canadian Girls

I’ve known a few Canadian girls,
though most I’ve never met.
Some from tiny prairie towns,
others from big cities, and yet
the one thing they all share,
is a toughness wrapped in sweet.
Maybe it’s because of their winters,
where they learn to make their own heat
as they walk to school in icy chills
a Carolina girl would say no over.
A Canadian girl will just smile and say,
“What’s the matter, eh? It’s only October!”
I know that it’s quite silly, though,
to lump all these girls together.
Each one is different, as you would see,
if you knew Joanne, Tasha, and Heather.
So I dedicate this poem to the ladies
from the Land of the Maple Leaf red.
I love them and the way they speak,
from sea to mer and from A to Zed.

On Day 11 of Poem-a-Day Challenge, a Dedication poem. And, since it’s the birthday of two of my dear Canadian “friends I never met’ (© Heather Grace Stewart), I figured this would be a good day and way to express my appreciation and affection for the ladies who’ve been so kind to me from The Great White North.

The Tenderfoot

The Tenderfoot, Charles Marion Russell 1900

Say there, cowboy, heard you first herded sheep,
but soon enough moved on to real live beeves.
So how’d a kid with callouses that deep
learn to paint as well as a Hopi weaves?

Taught yourself since you were a sprout, you say?
I b’lieve you done good in learning that art.
Now you paint people and things gone away,
real cowboys and Indians, but with heart.

I like how you showed them Piegan fellows
on ponies galloping hellbent for meat.
Them bufflers, I can almost hear their bellows,
like when there were more of them than Blackfeet.

So you’re happy now that you’re in Great Falls
‘stead of wrapped in a blanket under stars?
Or d’you miss them days when the heifer bawls
as we drove ‘em to Helena’s rail cars?

I’d say you done well for yourself, Charlie,
got this fine house and a pretty young wife.
Beats pushing a plow though a field of barley,
but I still think you might miss our old life.

‘Preciate you painting my picture there,
though I’m on the wrong side of that tussle.
Bucked like a tenderfoot on that li’l mare
I believe was your show, Charlie Russell.

For Day 4 of the NaPoWriMo Poem-a-Day Challenge, the prompt called for a “painter” poem, where I am to take a painter and make him or her the title and subject of my poem. If you know me, you know my, ohhhhh, let’s say obsession with the American West. From when it butted up against my backyard in New York to what we now call the Old West. One of my favorite artists of that time is the great Charles M. Russell, who gave new meaning to the term “cowboy artist,” since he was both. This poem’s a conversation, one-sided at best, between an old cowboy chum of Charlie’s visiting him with reminiscences and maybe a slight bone to pick. 

All The World Was His Stage

Will always got a perfect mark from his favorite professor. I don’t begrudge him his success. He came from pretty tough circumstances. First of his family to go to college, small rural high school and all.

Okay, I kind of resent the fact that Will Shakespeare got a reputation as “the most inventive and gifted writer our English Department has ever produced” according to a college newsletter to alums and donors.. 

Will was a nice enough guy. Quite friendly and very well-spoken. We hit it off our first week at a dorm mixer. I’d say he over-compensated for his farm boy upbringing by walking around like he was strutting on stage or something, but it did get the attention he craved. 

“Christine, I understand you write poetry,” he said as he swept up to me.

“Uh huh,” I said. “Been lucky enough to have a few things published. But I want to be a doctor, so the artist side of me will have to take a bit of a hiatus, I guess.”

“Wow, I’d love to have my words published one day. See some of my stories turned into plays, movies or even video games. Would you like to read some of them?” Will said.

“Sure,” I said. They were pretty bad. 

After that, Will was always hanging around my room. That is, if he wasn’t sucking up to the head of the English Department. 

Will made sure we always sat together in our Freshman Composition class. Soon it became, “Christine, I’m having trouble with this poem.” “Chrissie, how can I straighten out this essay?” “Chris, can you fix this story for me, pleeeeze?”

And, for whatever reason, I would help him. That more often than not, ended up with me putting aside my Organic Chem or Spanish 3 and essentially rewriting his work.

“What do you think of this?” he’d say.

“Will, you saw that on TV just last night.”

“So, it was a good story.”

“Yes, but you have to switch it up, give it a different slant, change the characters and setting, and puh-leeeze stop writing ‘should of’ when it’s ‘should HAVE.”

“Show me,” he’d say.

He was very sweet. Handsome in a gentle, long-haired, softly goateed way. I loved how he’d massage my shoulders while I turned his chicken shit prose into Chicken Kiev for Professor Kaplan. He’d enter my room with a flair, never wander in, always a grand entrance. 

And I loved how he’d softly compliment my hair, my nails, my new bedspread, the photos I’d taken from my trips to Europe and California. Oh, and my clothes, always my clothes.

He’d wear those skinny jeans with nice buttoned shirts that bordered on something from Forever 21. He even asked if he could borrow one of my peasant-sleeved blouses more than once. He was pretty skinny and could get away with wearing a size 10 or a medium. Just like me.

Next thing I know, he’s borrowed (stolen) a pair of my leggings and he’s wearing them around campus under a pair of workout shorts. As I said, he was pretty skinny and about as unathletic as a combined English/Theatre major could be 

“Will, I want my clothes back,” I told him.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Chrissie. I thought I’d try that look. Nathan loved it and he gave me a pair of his running tights to wear instead — more colorful than plain black. I’ll drop them off tomorrow.”

Nathan was Professor Kaplan. And tomorrow was never. Next thing I know, Will left school. His roommate told me he headed to New York with Kaplan to meet some of his old theatre buddies. Never came back. No note or a text or any kind of goodbye. When I got back to school for my senior year, I saw that alumni magazines with a photo of Will on the cover. It said he’d become a protegé of some writer-producer and had mounted his first off-Broadway play, which got great reviews from the New York papers.

I can’t remember if I cried the night I read that. Not that I should care what a skinny, femme, social-climbing, plagiarizing wanna-be Sam Shepard did with his life. I was headed to Duke Medical School, after all.

Will died recently. Nice obit in The Times. I was surprised when I received a letter at my Charlotte practice from a New York lawyer.

The Broadway whiz kid had mentioned me in his will. I was to receive his second Golden Globe, the one for that execrable movie that his last mentor had juiced the Hollywood Foreign Press to give him.

A second envelope, addressed in Will’s flourishing script was addressed it to me, Christine Marlowe. I pulled from it a note written by Will. No doubt. It read:

Good friend, for Christ’s sake listen,
Without you my career would sure be missin’
Thanks for always being there to save my ass,
And fuck those critics who doubted I had class.

Yeah, he always sucked as a writer. But the boy could act. Oh, how we loved that boy’s act.

This is a quickly penned response to a prompt from writer Julie Duffy. I needed the help. I was supposed to write a story of 750 words or less (FAIL!) featuring a character from history or mythology, but place them in a different era. I pulled this scribble out of my nether regions in about an hour. I know. Reads like our Will Shakespeare’s hideous “real” writing. I may try this again with someone else later.

Mea Culpa, If You Like

I’m sorry if I haven’t said “Sorry,”
since I’m usually good about guilt.
Of that capacity you could fill a lorry
with enough remorse a prison could be built.

I’ve taken all your reproaches to heart,
even though some of my sins are projection,
that might have been formed and thrown on your part.
I’m sure it’s your form of self-protection.

Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand,
my mea culpa for sins you think I did.
It’s my safekeeping you don’t understand,
and due to my dutiful ways I hid.

But here’s what you want, “I apologize.”
Let’s see how much real acceptance that buys.

The Spider

Slept here, watched here,
leapt here, fed here
in the window of this house
we’ve built for one another.
As you scurry past my watchtower,
solitary, I’ve seen your
comings and goings,
your joys and sorrows,
your yesterdays, todays
and hoped-for tomorrows.
With every turn, you rip away
a corner of this Web I’ve stretched
to sense the quickening
and ceasing pulses of things
I can’t see with my many eyes.
Once torn, I spin a new yarn
to memorialize your passing.
But the foundation has failed
and our house is falling, blowing me
away upon its final exhalation.
I am suspended in air without wings
and the great descent it comes.
For this moment, though, I see
all our lives spread beneath me,
the ever solitary spider…
And never have I felt so alone.