Worry

Even fresh from napping,

my mind picks up a thread

of worry and begins to

                stab and twirl

and knit and purl

                with its crafty needles.

Threading and fretting,

                Jabbing and wrapping,

Then we tat and mend

                Into a too-tight mess.

Turning it back and forth,

over and over again,

pulling and bunching

things much worse than they were.

The sewing machine comes out

with a bang and roars zig zag over

it forward and back

until its unrecognizably contorted

in a knot of my own creation.

I add my embellishments of ric-rak and beads

without any concern for structure,

pattern, and plan.

Cross-stitch on top of it all

Until I

Stop

Take a breath

Shake my head

And exhale

Undoing my worrisome

Handiwork

Loose threads; let me rest!

Somebody

Somebody out there is smiling as the wind whips her plain brown

hair around her oversized sunglasses.

The red Volkswagen, convertible top down, driven joyously by her beau

passes me, heading East

While my Westward pining heartbreak grieves my mother.

It’s my turn for this,

and soon I hope I can be headed back red convertible style

As is life’s way

Run Away

 

I ran away to the beach today.

Well, I drove fast on the winding Lucas Valley Road to Limantour, playing sad Alison Krauss songs in an

Unsuccessful attempt to trick my steely heart into an overdue mourn.

The shaker is empty

Let the sea air salt my freshly peeled cucumber, teeth ripping into it whole, unsliced devoured in chunks unladylike-

I’m here at the source asking to feel,

To have crystalized mineral anger dump – I don’t want it anymore.

Here, you take it back.

I need no knife to cut the heel of the French bread loaf to pieces –

I can chew what my strong set jaw gnaws free.

The brie, or what’s left of it, smooshed in the bread pocket, unfancy.

I don’t have to be good.  I can practice bad poetry and gnash with my teeth

What I can’t seem to wail.

patchwork

So many ungrounded ten thousand feet in the air

Corduroy patchwork

Rumbling below the black winged silver white bird

With 100 sets of eyes

Those eyes see sage green autumn alfalfa

Rusty brown stitched

With scriggles of river

Across taupy smooth irregular

Squares

The bigger the white bird grows

The smaller the patches on

The ground become under cumulous

Pillows of white cotton clouds

We divide and fence and divide

Again

What was once undividable,

Shared and whole, intact,

So many ungrounded ten thousand feet in the air

Mt. Crumpet Tipping Point

The way the clerk

Snapped at me, do

I really wanna haul

That around in my

Max-pulled, already overloaded

Grinch sled of shit?

Let it go

And save Max!

Let my heart grow 2000% !

Pink Roses

Mom, there are pink roses in my new December yard

Just like the ones I plucked from the wreath on your casket

last May

The roses from the yard follow me inside to

vases in nearly every room

as if their following could fill the empty ache of

missing you

Heathrow

There is no cheese for this rat at terminal 4

There was no cheese at terminal 5

And despite the best direction following

Skills available thru the maze that is Heathrow,

Neither was there cheese at terminal 3

Escalators, trains, buses, and lines

Baa-sheeping along with the others

Sometimes their tapping at the dispenser opened

A gate and they passed through

Rewarded

Sometimes they were sent back; “wrong line”

And forced to wriggle upstream of all the  crowding others

To find another line

No gate assignments, even when finding terminal 1,

Instead wait for the gate announcements on those

Infuriating signs made

Fuzzy by leap frogging into another day

Nine time zones from home