in preparation of retrospect

Living single. You must have known it would come up eventually. As I adjust to the bliss of anticipation, it occurs to me that bliss is linked closely to the fact that I am alone, have been alone, and planned always to be alone. I revelled in our togetherness because there was so much time apart. Now, I am not going to be alone anymore. And while that is a happy notion, I'm ever so slightly unnerved. I'm big on space and privacy. Huge. So, lately I've been sitting around, as I will, surveying the end of life as I know it. I brood. I consider. I do everything but get off the fucking vortex of a couch. That life-sucking thing hasn't let me up for years. Maybe I won't even take it with me. No -- his is worse. Lorretta told me to just start packing the art. She said, in fact, that I'd never leave as long as it was pretty inside my little sanctuary. I hate it when she's right. So, last friday night we began.... She began. She started packing my books. I stopped her. She smiled, sat, waited. Tried again the next night. I told her she could pack the books in the back bedroom. Nothing more. Then, finally, she made her astute comment and we began in earnest. Its funny how quickly I remembered my moving skills, the rhythm of it all. In no time, my home was reduced to a shell, pale green walls full of nails, full of cobwebs, absent my things: a metal falling star with James Dean in the window, the wooden staircase, the monkey, my crappy paintings. My first dishwasher. And the hard part is, Lorretta doesn't have a home anymore, and I can't leave her mine. The stark reality that I am a property owner with all of the attendant responsibilities and impossibilities jostles memories loose and up they float...

poem for my mother

she took people in
my mother
out of fashion these mean days
enabling
codependent
now we have nowhere to go
when we fuck up
or fuck off
or tire of being adults
the long days
of relentless responsibility
to rather buy whiskey
than electricity
and she undertood
she drank whiskey once
for twenty years
and we took her in.