After Months Sorting Their Stuff

Mom and dad left a full house behind
and I wouldn't call them hoarders
because it was all tucked away
though in a sense they were
so little got thrown out
kept radios, shoes
also surprises
like dad's
diary

Sometimes I hear
poetry calling me in
and I hear teaching
shouting to go away.

Neil Has Updated His Status

Lately I've been hiding from
Facebook, and my friends there
but it's no person who scares me
more that I fear setting boundaries

A wise woman once said that the path
to hell is paved with bad boundaries
and I say that we're moving targets
for the surroundings we must limit

And who I let say what to me
particularly speaking in my head
and treatment I say I deserve and

what I accept to be tasked with

These are all just arenas to play
a game called Set the Boundaries
and if I don't bring it I feel defeat
hitting this keyboard like lockers

So as I break my self set curfew
sitting here dreading the dotted line
between being awake and asleep
I say an unbound, poem prayer

As my blog is my witness, I
am ready to be ready to let
the boundaries I need get set
which now means going to bed

I don't know who my parents
were and I don't know who I
am, though I've known us each
as long as I've been doing this
wondering who we all are, like
I'm doing now, as usual, here,
in front of my desktop screen,
reaching my hands over papers
hunting and pecking these keys.

For Delmore Schwartz

Sorting through parents'
piles of years of saved stuff
deep in a back shelf
I find their wedding album
that I'd never seen
that it seems they'd forgotten
and I want to know
why, though I already do
and also, I don't

I just wish it had been out
and we would have looked
at it as a family:
their spin on all the clichés
the eating the cake picture
the posed kiss picture
the just married car picture
all the dreams before
the responsibility

Hidden Revelation

My divorced friends project
their flavor of loneliness
onto never married me

But they've had a spouse with
whom they've shared a house
with whom they've shared a bed

For me, it's only been me
calling my space my home
having the bed to myself

And they conceived children
who made children themselves
and created grandparents

And I have what they lacked
even twenty years ago
ever single loneliness

And I pray that they get
a new start, a new spouse
a new comfort by their side

And I share now, alone here
that I am maybe ready
to try for the first time

In Unfake Time

Now, I sit before this space

with no poem to paste, 

only thoughts 

to pick from scratch.

And I'm unsettled

by my resistance 

to settling in,

hiccuping thoughts, 

winding up 

instead of down.

Then, unsure how much it's worth,

spun from this hunting and pecking,

I see tufts of word cotton candy,

an ethereal illusion which whispers

to me that I can safely go to sleep.