Long Bathwater Poems
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In the cold tub, at ten-thirty in the morning, I float like a wreck after a week of drinking and gambling,
My body trembles, my mind is a dense fog, when suddenly the phone rings like a bell in an empty church.
A young voice, a folk singer, tells me she has kicked out her boyfriend, his clothes flying out the window like lost birds,
I explain the cycle of love, a mad carousel of closeness and separation, a song endlessly repeating in the heart of time.
She asks if I want to hear her new song, and I, naked and wet, sit on the edge of the couch like on the edge of life's abyss,
My thoughts are as dirty as the bathwater, but I laugh at her funny lyrics, an old and tired clown's mask.
I tell her I like it, a white lie like the foam of the whiskey I later swallow, an antidote for my poisoned soul,
I promise to keep in touch, but the words are as empty as my pockets after a day at the racetrack, where luck deserted me again.
Six hours later, I am poorer by five hundred dollars, the money evaporated like my hopes for a better future,
I approach the phone, a tempting serpent of communication, but I leave it untouched, no one wants to hear a loser’s complaints.
The radio plays a sad song, the perfect mirror of my weary soul, defeated by my own inner demons,
The darkness of the bedroom swallows me, and I sink into it like a sea of regrets and madness, a castaway of my own life.
I lie in bed and stare into the void, lost in the labyrinth of my own mind, a Minotaur trapped in his own chaotic creation,
The thoughts spin like racehorses on an infinite racetrack, without a winner, without an end, just an eternal and futile race.
I am once again madly bound, caught between the walls of harsh reality and shattered dreams, a prisoner of my own choices,
A poet of despair, a singer of failure, a master of self-destruction in this crazy world that spins without me.
From a mouthful of this morning’s eggs,
I pull bits of char from yesterday’s breakfast.
‘I had no chance to scrub the pan’, I plea with myself-
But I still smash it over my skull
like a cartoon.
Every morning I wake up
feeling last night’s feelings,
thinking last night’s thoughts,
about what’s happening 10 years ago,
and what happened tomorrow.
If you add up every
simultaneous
suffocating
moment
I fight through-
just to say:
‘i love you’
It would stretch for longer than I’ve known you,
which is longer than I’ve been alive.
There was no ‘today’ in my broken egg.
No difference between coming or going,
to an automaton in purgatory
who saw life through the pinhole eyes
of a cardboard mask won at a birthday party
I never asked for.
The sky looked like the ceiling of a small, dark closet.
and flowers looked like plastic bargain bin decor
coated in lead paint, the kind left on roadside graves.
I used to count those as a child,
on the way to destinations
I still dread my arrival to.
If I were brave enough to show you my awe and my terror
of loving the one who revealed
the world as something real, all this time-
I would sink face down in dirty bathwater
choking on wet, laughing sobs
until my fingerprints wrinkled away
and tear at my clammy skin
until my soft nails bent backward
and paint red bruises all over my trembling body
that would spell out a primitive language
neither of us had the chance to learn.
This is my best guess:
‘i am just a bad thing that happened
a book of false memories and blind feelings.
You are a very fast reader,
You’ll soon reach the end of me.’
I remember drawing a map in crayon
of every ditch I saw myself lying in
strange, unnatural positions.
Like I'd been struck by a car,
and someone shoved my body away
so I wouldn’t mess up the next one.
Expectations and like the many changing faces.
We are constantly trying to fit the best one to put on.
I constantly try to adjust one side and keep one's truth hidden deep inside.
Embedded in so much gunk
Embedded in so much trauma
You might have even learned this from your momma.
How well placed you present yourself to the world.
Then, at home, you are the most disillusioned, dysfunctional girl.
I was trying to please a society so complex.
I am trying not to throw everyone in the bathwater just yet.
You open your heart
You earnestly walk
Saying to yourself it's not that bad after all.
But reality creeps in, and you're standing there naked, vulnerable to your truth
Why did you even hide in it?
I was stumbling through life, trying to fit in.
You are losing yourself, even beaten into submission.
Not just by law but of your kind. The biggest disappointment you could think of in life.
Away you go, like the fool again.
Still so open and green to the shadows.
Another face, but hey, who cares?
No one asked you your truth, and I guess that's fair.
I don't care.
I don't care what they say.
I know my truth, and I'm determined to walk in a REAL heart space.
No one to make me feel bad.
No one to take my power.
I'll send all that unwarranted hate and evil eye back to God anyway.
So I'd instead breathe and laugh with earnest joy. If God got me, what in the heck am I worried for?
I love all of me.
All of my unique, quirky, beautiful abundance and bliss.
I'm in love with this person; I was in a shell.
A cocoon with a transformation of a butterfly ?? that's off exploring the world.
Take Care.
Gratitude attitude grow
Peacock attitude away throw
Though temptations line up in a row
Pointless, heartless any soul you to hurt
Under no circumstances invective blurt
Because so doing grows you curt
Achieving trinkets, reaping limpets
As you blow trivial trumpets
Deriding, riding, restless strumpets
In your city where contempt
Fashionable in an objectional attempt
To parade low grade hair unkempt
For aeons under neon lights
Illuminating prudish, brutish fights
Meant to ignore the snore of plights
Street kids endure under the watch
You observe at close quarters to catch
Miscreants and recidivists who latch
Onto corruption
To catalyze the eruption
So blatantly witnessed in the disruption
Probity suffers as wafers
Vanish into thin air when quaffers
Poke fun at a senile souse who suffers
Ravages of loneliness
You regret in the context of silliness
Egrets and open secrets endure as holiness
Suffers its biggest reverse
To learn men of the collar deemed so averse
To child molestation in vows so diverse
Embarrass your church
Leaving doubting Thomases in the lurch
As for meaning and direction they search
Wondering if hypocrisy in this crisis
Should call and recall paralysis
To promote or demote dialysis
As a cure for the malaise
Believers suffer in the craze
That undermines set standards in a maze
In which a plethora of anguish
You bear as you strive to distinguish
Reality from fiction. Your faith don’t extinguish
Or else you throw baby together with bath water
In the church and in your quarter
To deny you opportunities for malfeasance to alter.
Buried beneath blood-shot baby doll eyes
where drowns dark truths dwelling empty despair,
finds five fraught faces from false idol lies
clinging cold-coffins caused by cruel affair;
Saddled by sorrow seen in mother’s stare,
washed while awaiting where water is filled
pouring in porcelain planned to be killed;
Languishing lost lacking warmth much less love,
ended in eerily foul episodes,
angrier now than Almighty above
mumbling murmurs in murderous modes;
Ripe for wrongs reversed through revengeful roads,
tantalized terrors too tempted to taste
blood brought by bathwater boiling in baste;
Chastised and chided, these children chilling
journey for justice with jealous intent,
mystically moving, maddened minds milling,
howling horrific while haunting content;
For sins suffered by souls salvation bent,
never they rest now, now nestled in night,
purposed, their plight, seeks parents punished right;
Aiming as arrows at any ones found,
dripping disgust at desolate devils,
grumble gigantic than gnash to the ground
lustfully lashing in lunatic levels;
As rancid bells heard, rusted rung rebels,
thoroughly thrashing throats within their reach,
fifty fingers, if figured, ten for each.
And why wouldn’t what withered weary do,
dragged desperate to death by der’lict brain,
taught terrible things when tongues tied untrue
incited mother inside turned insane?
Silence should swallow who speaks sour on slain,
judgments be gentle, gestate not Hell’s gates,
for these are the children of Andrea Yates.
9/16/2016
Submitted For: Scare Me Good Poetry Contest
I like fixing broken things.
I detest breaking things to fix them.
I cannot deny that I sit where you sit.
You see things broken and needing to be fix.
I see things well built and needing to be adjusted.
From where I sit;
From my perspective;
From where I hear and see;
From what I feel and sense;
From my heart, I believe it's true;
There are a lot of things broken.
Broken promises; broken hearts.
Broken people, communities, and nations.
But there are also things that are not broken.
For things broken, it's natural to try and fix them.
But things that are not broken should be left alone.
There seem to be a mad rush to fix, to redo America.
America has problems, lots of them, but she is not broken.
Yes, I see Cracks in our pillars of strength.
Yes, I see Leaks in our walls of defense.
Yes, I see Tears in the fabric of our society.
But I see a Foundation holding solid and strong.
Some Ingredients may have been left out of the menu,
but that calls for an addition to make it better, not a fixing.
Remember, we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
May we remain seated together to fix only what is truly broken.
090821PS
"You drown not by falling in a river, but by staying submerged in it.”
A gentle mist
billows above the man-made pond
that spawns a rippling
sorrel-dusky brook
that ebbs and widens as it becomes
a river.
The runnel is dark rust colors,
it is restful but unquiet,
as its flow
softly murmers.
The tributary sits next to a parking lot.
A car's yellow-
white headlights
are bright orbs six feet
above the rivulet;
the lights
penetrate the early morning
as two approaching comets...
Hot water
pours into the tooth colored tub,
it rises;
Irish feet
with puffy soft ankles
step into the bath,
the knees bend
as the hands grasp the tub's sides-
she plops heavily
into the bathwater,
she thinks that the thud disturbs
the tenants below...
never a sound from them.
Her legs curl in Indian style,
the warmth comforts...
The river, yes, is restful;
and twisted, bent branches of trees,
thin, small and dove brown,
adorn the dirt banks,
reach over the rill-
they are knowing spectators...
and she soaks,
and she becomes cleaner;
she levitates, like the aurora's brume...
The river winds
throughout the towns and cities in which she walks, before the sea captures...
it is in some places
shallow, she can see the sandy bottom
is the tint of sunshine;
the river
seems to always be near her...
and the river brings her home.
January 1, 2022
The darkest moments come when she’s in the bath,
…she sits there, waiting for them, staring into
The ignominious bathwater, so crystal clear,
Beckoning her head to sink into its cleansing purity,
The baptism of quiet bubbling death…
Black and shadowy, the demons float,
Just beneath the surface, their grotesque maws
Gaping at her from every little bubble, mocking, jeering,
Calling her down, down…down
Into the drowning deep, where she can see her face,
Her miserable hooded eyes, reflected in the
Impersonal white marble
Seduced, her bloodless lips part to inhale,
Drawing the liberating flow into her gullet,
Into her lungs, her poor, protesting choking lungs…
The demons caper and splash in delight, caressing her
With claws that feel silky smooth as water, as bubble bath…
They are just bubbles now…
Abruptly her jaw snaps shut, fear and fury sparking in hollow eyes,
She has been deluded, deceived…
Comprehension dawning in gasping waves, she jerks upright,
Emerging from the water like a mottled sea creature,
Hacking, retching, liquid death dribbling down her pallid chin
Foiled, the demons gurgle and howl as she reaches down,
Yanks out the plug, and watches them swirl away down the drain,
Just so much dirty bathwater…
“I fight the good battle!” I thought:
But a warrior
whether Christ’s or the Devil’s, or Self
is still “A blade held high” demon
of sorts, though the conscious motive
May be of highest righteousness--
the transformation of darkness into light.
The demon
(our second-hand creation)
(manipulating matter
but not the originators),
a recycling of lesser egos
claiming the Formative Light
our own
though pure and complete
before our jealous
acquisition--
Divine relationship denied
(the arrogance of man),
agnosia perpetuated--
our insufferable debate over
that tender-less chicken
or her overcooked egg;
And oh--the science!
We squeeze even our genitals
into a singularity
(the academics juiced answer to all)
when denying the enriching trickles--
the crushed, the spirit-runny,
our essence, the immortal soul,
with each bathwater tossed.
When, in our power to create
truly as The Omnipotence:
from nothingness;
out of canvas yet
uncut from the fabric
of time--
not with warrior knife
nor artist brush
but by faith alone--
by love and grace…
Grace that has kept man alive
prepared to some day make
of sleeping, self-possessed children
fully awakened
independent
Gods.
In dreams I see them:
Men and women, in Renaissance attire,
Moving about in silence in some fabulous cathedral
Full of silent Coptics and other sombre monks,
Their faces, all but one of them,
Obscured to uniformity by cloth
Silent themselves, they move about with aimless grace
Within the vast chamber that echoes my every footfall,
Drifting in trance like leaves carried past on invisible waters,
Performing miracles casually, as though to do so
Were as natural as breathing.
I watch them pass, bringing forth their miracles
Like magicians cause cards to appear in their hands;
Somehow I know they know themselves
To be The Fools of God.
The one whose face is unmasked is a woman,
A stocky beauty of radiant expression,
Whose miracle is astonishing:
She wades through the polished marble floor
As though it were bathwater, up to her shoulders,
Her ecstasy rendering her incorporeal
Yet supremely present,
Smiling in glory, God's Chief and Happiest Fool.
Who these mystics are I cannot say,
Nor why they consider themselves Celestial Jesters;
Though my guess is that the lesson here
Is that perfect faith births perfect joy,
As in the end, the Fool has the ear of the King.