The Gertrude of Forbearance

She never stopped, he noticed, as she walked Detroit Avenue, heading for the grocery store. The thinking, the perseverating about what she was going to eat for dinner, what she’d already eaten that day, changing her mind about dinner, persecuting herself for planning to buy a bag of potato chips, these he saw with interest and sympathy.
He watched her turn into the short walkway past Burger King, past the other storefronts and on into Marc’s Deep Discount Grocery Store, all the while fretting over what her doctor had said to her about hypertension, her risk of heart attack and his admonitions to avoid salt.
He cooed, blew a slight breeze across Gertrude’s face, and she dropped her cogitating, if just for a moment.
This was the one he’d chosen. She had a sweet disposition; hers was a life to which he knew he could bring progress.
Gertrude entered the market, clutching the handle of the shopping cart given her by the attendant, leaned on it and used it to sustain her wheezing, perspiring form. She wheeled up the produce aisle, her cart vacillating back and forth; one of the wheels, stuck. She pushed forward regardless, as he fed her notions of steamed green beans, of kale and broccoli. She avoided these images, pressed them deep down past her belly, down her flabby legs and into her over-stuffed shoes.
When she had made it out of the produce section, she recanted. “I’ll eat my vegetables and I’ll LIKE them,” she said to no one in particular.
“Yes, dear Trudy!” he congratulated her in her mind, thinking the words to her through an image of her departed mother.
Wheeling back with some difficulty in her dilapidated pram, she grabbed a bag of iceberg lettuce and tossed it into the bottom of the cart. “That will do, for now”, an image of her father said in her imagination.
When she had gotten herself to the dressings, she perused all the selections.
“My, I never knew there were so many yummy choices!” she said to herself, and picked Creamy Garlic Caesar. Tight-lipped, he spoke nothing to this.
When she had reached the checkout, deftly making it (he saw with satisfaction) past the potato chip aisle, he quipped, “Bravo, my good girl. Bravo!” in the inner guise of her doctor.
---
That night, she sat alone in her cluttered kitchen, the sound of the TV set squawking from the other room. She munched on a Burger King, original chicken sandwich with a bowl of lettuce, drowned in Caesar dressing. The raw sounds of the couple below her, the man screaming at his wife, the wife crying back at him, just barely penetrated the cheerful applause of Wheel of Fortune. Pat Sajak’s darling voice attempted to squelch the uneasiness in the pit of her stomach.
But Gertrude had had enough. Not enough dinner, enough of that monster’s mistreatment of her downstairs neighbor.
Gertrude resolved that, the next day, she would bring Marlyse some chocolates. She would listen to her friend, and they would work on some solution to her problems, together, over a box of Malley’s Nutmallow.
And she didn’t care about the promptings of that voice in her head that admonished her to respect Marlyse’s privacy, to not make waves. Tonight, a different kind of thought, one completely her own, was brewing in her heart.

Grandmother Lovely

Grandmother lovely
Gray and pepper
Smile like Mona Lisa
Watching video on laptop
Smirks, giggles
Laughs outright
Then stately, serene

I pine for my secret crush
Distracted from my studies
Pull in vignettes from the bakery
To allay my anxiety
Untidily complete the circuit
Of my inattention

I'll Have the Cannibal Platter (and make me well done)

The difference between
Uplifting oneself
And groveling
The understanding
That makes this difference
Irrelevant
This, this
Is such sublime
Crucifixion

Only in the eye
The light finds
Its completion
Only in the grave
The eye shuts forever
And light is free
A coin with no value
At last
Knows not an ounce
Of gratitude
For this sacrifice
Because it is
Sacrifice
Itself

Muse of Silences

songstress, soundless
to pluck her plum
to swallow the grape
that bursts with ecstasy
in your throat
her hair strung tight
then undone
so nonchalant

not the end of the strum
that interests us
but the breast to which
the vibrations are held
and from the world of sound
-- soften
then cease
their existence
from the wooden column
of atmosphere and time
uncarved

most museful one
marvelous, inquisitive
into the fecundity
of unanswerable questions
sends the one that sends
us all mad, on fire
with answers that will not
make the burning
stop

East for salvation

"turn your eyes and ears
without for revolution
within for revelation
East for salvation"

from an incomplete song I wrote, circa 1986



music pumped my lifeblood
my friends walked the ground
that I worshiped
food, an unfailing comfort
romance, I sacrificed for self-study
through marijuana

I tripped the wire that year
an inner depth charge erupted
my life broke free

my mind, unraveling
thick with wet sand
my head, dangling
by a strand

the only things that survived that shock
were an addiction to God
and a trek on a dry desert path
to some undisclosed
abode of awakening

where Stan and Ed
U2 and R.E.M.
my shiny, new elephant bowl
and adequate nutrition
could not follow

the bird in me

by an odd
ornithological
osmosis
the hatred in you
becomes the bird
in me

have I left you
bereft of kindness
in cultivating
my own?
no, I will not take
responsibility
for the cruelty of others
anymore
once I would have been fooled
by my bleeding heart
hoodwinked, hornshnozzled

I start to discern now
the disgust you earn
from my indecisiveness
my failings
by no means saintly
I stand here as me
and you, as you
in your toxicity

a day with Linda (1986)

we took our shoes off
walked the Euclid Creek
throwing rocks into the water
careful not to get too wet

afterwards, I drove her
to a new, used book shop
in an old, mildewy building

she browsed novels
while I looked through "Religion"

when we got back to her place
I gave her back her copy
of Somerset Maugham's, "The Razor's Edge"
I had read the epigraph –
“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard."
but not much more of it

she asked if I would like
to come upstairs
look through old photos
I declined, saying, "Thanks"
and "I have to go"
returned to my car
and drove home