Absolute
Loving
Obscene
Narcissistic
Everlasting

My Dad was married twice.
Each marriage lasted one year.
He says he’ll never get married again.
He and his girlfriend Sis have been together
for what, ten years?
She’s still married to Billy McNabb

My Dad has had a whole slew of interesting relationships
I was around to witness most of them,
though I never did meet the lady he picked up on Greyhound,
the family says she was a real piece of work,
and not in a good way.
I’ll tell you a little something about the rest of them…

My mother:
My mother was the first woman my Dad was ever with
My Dad kept a journal,
at 21 years old, he wrote:
Met a nice girl named Darlene.
I invited her to my campsite and she’s been here ever since.

Both of them were quick to the draw,
my Dad proposed and my mother got pregnant.
Actually it was the other way around.
Thereafter she couldn’t keep it in her pants so it didn’t work out
She’d decorated the house in a dutch theme with little windmills
and wooden shoes and everything but then she left one day and
I overheard someone say she was out “jumping trains”

A few years later my Dad met Suzanne.
Suzanne was a real independent woman,
nothing like my mother.
She had a house and a son my age.
Suzanne had a beautiful olive complexion and a nice ass.
She went to church.
She made sure I took baths.
She towel dried my hair once,
put me in a clean pair of her stretch pants. They were gray.
Things were just wonderful until she met someone else.
My Dad was man enough to attend their wedding,
where I was the flower girl.
I cried but my Dad assured me they had always
been friends more than anything else.
I thought those must’ve been her words, not his.
I’d seen him in her bed after all.
I remember she kept a cookie jar up on the counter,
it was shaped like a strawberry.
Sure enough it always had cookies or candy in it.
Suzanne was a good woman.

My Dad had a girlfriend whose name I will not disclose.
She was the laziest sonofabitch you’ve ever met,
but she raised a ruckus in bed.
She had ropes tied to the frame of her bed,
Her kids showed them to me one time.
She was big into romance novels, erotic movies, and paganism
She claimed that the song “Pretty Woman” was written for her
I doubt it.

Cher.
Cher was a heroine addict from out of town,
that’s about all I remember about her.
She spent a lot of time nodding off on the couch

Lisa,
Marriage #2
Lisa is a main character in my memoir.
My family liked to call her the “Wicked Witch of the West”
behind my Dad’s back
She’s dead now, rest her soul,
freak accident involving a heavy entertainment center.

My Dad’s current girlfriend, Sis,
was a god-send
She’ll talk your ear off in her thick southern accent
She’s from Louisiana, a true lowlander;
born and raised in a floating shack on the bayou.
Sis cares.
Sis loves.
But Sis is one crazy mother%^&er.

Lisa was in it for the money, if you can imagine that.
My mother took and took and took love, trying to
fill up all that empty space inside of her.
She couldn’t give any back.
Sis is a good woman and I’m glad she’s around.
Her real name is Lillian, but don’t tell her I told you that.
Sometimes she talks in the third person and calls herself “Sissy”:
Sissy got yo’ back

All my Dad ever wanted was for a woman to stay
When he’s with a woman,
he only has eyes for her
He still goes to see Pretty Woman sometimes
but not for the reason you’re thinking.
She pays him cash for doing her yard work.

Waxing gibbous hanging up in the sky
A tinted backdrop of subtle pink and blue
In the forefront, winter’s naked oak trees,
a couple of spruce trees,
Skinner’s Butte,
2 hotels: the Econo Lodge
and America’s Best Value Inn
The President apartment complex
A parking lot
Toyota’s, Honda’s, Chevrolet’s…

A young girl darts out from the inside of
an apartment, her petite brunette mother follows
I see a siamese cat run across the street
It’s a beautiful cat, I’ve been seeing it around lately,
The little girl sees the cat,
She sticks out her hand and opens it and closes it
She mouths “kitty” or something of the like
Her mother looks impatient at first but
then lets the little girl pet the cat

The mother and daughter and the cat are twenty
yards or so from a four-laned road where
there is traffic day and night,
we’ve gotten used to the traffic.
This is looking outside my window.
I just can’t get over
the bright waxing moon,
dusk takes my breath away.
In the morning there will be seagulls.

It was during childhood, of course,
before I knew well the things that poison,
when all I knew was ecstasy granted to me through:
rays of sunlight, the shock of surprisingly warm or cool
water, jack-in-the-boxes, stories, games, tickling, candy

The happiest moment of my life happened in
the afternoon or the early evening,
summertime or early fall
I’d spent the day at my friend Jessica aka “Porky’s” house
Porky had a bunch of brothers who, after a while
got to be too much, sometimes they sounded to me like
mainstream radio — just noise.
So I exercised my freedom that day by saying goodbye and
I walked out the sliding glass door, jumped off the porch,
walked past the chicken coop and through the ditch
that led back to my house
(I lived in the country and Porky’s
house was right behind ours)
I stopped in the vacant lot
between her house and mine

I could no longer hear the boys.
I remembered how fortunate I was to not have any
brothers or sisters living with me
I stood for a moment, and just took in the world —
Jessica’s lively red house behind me
our quiet, silent as a mouse cabin just down the trail
the green mountains like God’s arms around me
Some quiet calm taking over my mind,
A feeling I recognized as the comfort of my own soul

I felt confident being alone
I looked around,
The ditch I’d just come through and the
property I was standing on was cluttered with
big, round, terracotta-colored boulders
The sunlight was hitting them from a certain angle
and they looked almost like gold, though matte, not shiny

Sunlight too was caught in the tall, pale grass that was everywhere,
I fingered the fuzzy tips of the grass as I stood there
I knew come winter the tall grass would be gone and
then in the summer fresh and green again
I remember I was wearing my purple Beauty and the Beast
t-shirt and maybe jeans and my dirty white Keds
Sheepishly, afraid someone might hear, I ever-so-quietly
sang a Disney song, imagining I was one of
those lonesome Disney Princesses,
I giddily skipped and waved my pretend gown
I was around six years old
It was the happiest moment of my life because
I had both serenity and hope,
I had

so

much

hope

I have to wonder,
as I notice a couple of dogs tied to the fence and
several transient-looking folk guarding the double doors,
cigarettes and loud voices in tow,
is this the place?
I’d been to a food bank before and it was calm
and quiet
This place was a zoo!
I take a deep breath, park the car and head inside

A long desk and three female employees are barely visible behind
a crowd of mainly men, all different colors, all different kinds
There is lots of back-slapping, secret handshakes and talk about
who saw who where and when between the men
It’s a party frankly
There is no particular order
There are no signs telling me where to get the food

I’m standing there shifting nervously from foot to foot,
Folks hold red raffle tickets in their hand
A black woman is calling out numbers from time to time,
where do I get a ticket?
I ask a woman with long gray hair and a gray hoodie for help
She tells me to stand in line for a ticket
There is no line but I don’t tell her that
I get do get a ticket, number 58

I sit next to a row of computers where
homeless-looking people are all on Facebook
One old man is looking at pictures of pretty girls
The black woman mentioned earlier tells the man his time
is up and he ignores her

I take a good look around,
I realize I should’ve dressed down,
I am embarrassed.
I notice a quiet man sitting,
He was looking at me when I looked at him
but then he looked away
He is wearing a bright-blue hat that has a
logo for a deep-sea fishing company on it
and a puffy South Pole brand jacket
He is one of those quiet, observant types.

A big black man is the life of the party
You can’t help but look at him
He could’ve been an actor or comedian, the hold
he has on the crowd
He has something crazy in his eye
Its mix of charisma and lunacy, he’s Dave
Chappelle, only much older
He singles me out,
he points at me from across the room
I don’t know what he’s saying but I
smile nervously at him
I hear him say, “I made the bitch smile!”
Foolishly I smile again
I have nothing to write this
poem on but a check from my checkbook
I run out space to write
I have a lot more to say

Our hair is all over the floor
We both have a lot of it
The floor is white tile
And we can see the hair all too well
I sweep it up every now and again,
he never does, which is just fine
The hair is in the carpet too
But you can’t tell so it doesn’t matter,
to me

There are a million things in this bathroom
Dozens of little glass bottles of oils and creams
Promised cures that never work on me
A big, pink plastic bottle of baby powder
that I don’t know how to use,
what, do I put it on my ass?
Like a baby?

His razor kit goes unused but once per month,
or less
He worries that a scruffy beard is not presentable,
I try to convince him otherwise

My necklace holder, hanger, thing, fell off the wall
I’ve been meaning to fix it
Meanwhile it remains on the shelf on its side,
beaded necklaces all in a knot beside it
I accessorize only with scarves lately

A claw-footed bathtub,
a photograph of Marylin Monroe in white
A painting of a lighthouse up on the wall
A pile of folded, fresh towels
Slinky, vintage nightgowns hanging on a plastic hook,
A pile of Cosmopolitan magazines
and a couple of bathroom readers filled with
trivia that I have a hard time remembering
A shell soap holder
and a bar of “no waste” soap — the
manufacturer punched out the center, funny.
This is our bathroom.
There’s a toilet too.

In our bathroom, I’ve never looked in the
mirror and said “who are you?”
I need not stand and stare, searching for
myself in my reflection,
I know myself surprisingly well now

I remember being on the floor in a
bathroom once doing drugs,
when I started feeling nauseous.
I crawled over to the toilet seat and
dry-heaved into the bowl a little bit
My friend who was with me said,
You’re going to overdose if you don’t be careful,
I told her,
Give me more

I couldn’t tell you what that last bathroom looked like
I only sat in there and watched my hands doing bad things.
The few times I got up and looked into the mirror,
I couldn’t tell you who I saw looking back at me
because I still don’t know.
A demon?
It was sexless,
It was weird.

His head in my hands,
a tired smile, swollen eyes
The mention of potatoes and eggs
for breakfast, maybe sausage too
Big, strong, pale hands with handsome,
almost pretty, fingernails
Him reaching out and gripping me
A man who won’t let me go,
even as I squirm and make excuses

I don’t cook as much as I used to
It used to be me coming home with the
freshest possible store-bought salmon
It used to be me trying fancy things like Italian
risotto, carmelized pears, rasberry-glaze and pork tenderloin
My old boyfriend got the best of my cooking yes he did
Back when I had hope
I have a little less of that now
But its coming back around,
I can feel it

I came home to his sleepy morning smile
We folded up together like kittens
put “brekkie”, as we call it, on hold
We slept and when we woke he told me:
Let’s try to stay together for as long as we can
He had that firm grip of his on me
I was squirming
I made myself settle down,
I said, I’ve been thinking the same thing

Can we afford filet mignon?
Am I still capable of a wine balsamic reduction sauce?
I stepped out of bed and put my feet on the ground in
a wholly different way

I cleaned real well for the first time in a while
I rearranged the furniture and asked him,
how do you like it?
I stood there looking at our bedroom:
our bed, my desk, the retro nightstand,
the brightly colored artwork
I let myself watch it evolve
The bed moved from the center of the room,
to over by the wall,
to the window,
and back to the center
give it a few years and it would
be all of those places
Give it a few years, give it a few years…

I watched the pictures move,
the tie-dye tapestry taken down,
put back up,
then taken back down again for good
I saw pictures of us,
only we don’t have any yet
I’ve been so shell-shocked I feel,
that I haven’t documented a thing
Don’t want to look back someday and
remember how good we had it
If it doesn’t work,
I don’t want to remember it at all.
You criticize me for this,
Don’t.

I need a big dream again, some hope
He is a bubble blown and I am a
little girl watching and waiting for him to pop
Too often I reach out and destroy the man myself

The month of January gifted me two
dreams which seemed more like premonitions
then residue from my waking life

One dream showed me consecutive green lights.
When I set out driving the morning after the dream,
that was all that I found:
consecutive green lights.
Wow.
I went back and forth across town twice
All green lights if you can believe it

The next dream, the final dream
was a dream about a river

In the dream I’m pointing at the river,
I’m looking back at two deceased relatives,
my paternal Grandmother, Beverly
and my Great Uncle Ray
I’m pointing at the river and saying:
Isn’t it beautiful?
I’m choking up, tears are in my eyes
I look back at the river,
its cloudy and pale green
Its how a river looks after heavy rain

I was browsing the Triplicate today,
the online version of the newspaper back home,
I saw that the headline read:
“Smith River Crests, More Flooding Possible”
I think I saw in my dream just how
the river looks back home.
Fact I know I did.

Oh, Oh, Oh, Its Magic, You knoowww….
Never Believe Its Not So