Shams' Muse

i keep pulling at this string that is a stitch holding together two otherwise gaping sides of my flesh in my mouth, the raw wound between. with my tongue, i pull at it and touch it tapper sur les nerfs, en francais. everyday, in my heart tapper sur les nerfs.

in dreams i can break free and you can hurt me by writing a sign that says: Go away.

my identity is so much a me that I am floored you have the same name.

a sad eyed lobster in the tank is waving its banded claws at me, flagging my attention. Save me, he says, save me. I turn away. I am so sick. All these packages of flesh and bone, as I am a package of flesh and bone. I walked along the streets in the snow which is now up to my ankles, and black fish are swimming in my blood. How will I make it through the last half of my life, I am afraid. I am afraid to be alone now. I am afraid of my future. I am going to live to the end of my days and will have done nothing to last beyond myself. They say that a teacher can never know just how long he matters. But I do not worry about my posterity as a teacher. I worry about my life as a strand of DNA. Am I to be the last of the great line that made me?

what is it with boys? boys who like girls. this is the boys i know. rachel, rachel, rachel. and i am ho hum staring into the galactic space, who are you? they go rachel rachel rachel. and i am ho hum what was your name? did we talk about that... oh now i remember. yes i remember now. and then they swim in my blood like a virus and i wake up one day sweating and shaking with some kind of desire for the boy who poked and prodded me to some kind of attention. Yes, what is it with boys? the day i notice them is the day they yank my hair and push me away, push me down, push me to the dirt. and then i follow them arms outstretched begging and crying for their attention now that i don't have it.

Come on baby Finish what you started says the song and me too. Come on baby. Come on and finish me.

feelings are like nuclear waste. there was a reaction that created them and they glowed colors unseen, unknown, eye candy. But then the decay begins. Bit by bit, the glow fades as the feelings turn into a grey, lifeless, dangerous mass. Causing irreperable damage at some cellular level in my brain circuitry. When I think of you, I think joy, then pain. When I think of you, I think joy, then pain. When I think of you. Nuclear waste does not go away by will. It goes away through time, as it decays into something else, or dissipates into nothingness. And so with you, and so with my feelings.

I thought I liked gertrude stein her poem was so creative so clever and then it went on too long.

i tried so hard so hard i tried what was it with you? did i do something? did i steal your thunder break your heart kick your knees out from under you douse your fire ash in your drink kiss your best friend lie to your face piss on your lawn? Whatever did I do to you short of be nice and nicer nicer and nicer and nicer and nicer until I had softened completely and I understood that this punch to the face was you punching you and I could be even nicer by standing in your shoes and taking the blow.

song is in my head again and again don't know what you mean in these words but i'm pretty sure that you're singing a song i understood really well a few months ago. is it the melody or the beat or the bass? i don't know, but it pins me, pins my mood. so here's what i think you mean. i'm going to tell you what you mean. nothing you can do about that.

I am starting to see the truth like a tiny flame in a dim room, and its making everything slightly yellow and brown. Better than black and grey. I'm seeing what I didn't see, sharp corners and all the tacks on the floor I've been stepping on and screaming. You aren't the person I want you to be. I painted you so beautifully in my mind, and gave you a medal of honor, a badge on your chest that could reflect my own eyes back in copper. I've got copper eyes If I think back hard, I sat alone a lot and waited. Maybe it was only good the first time and the second. Only logarithmycally did three become nine.

i can not believe that you bucked the trend and did not call me as everyone said you would. everyone said you would be back. i think i put my faith in that, because it let me go forward into my future, and was some kind of secret security, that no matter what future i had, i would get a chance to revisit what was left undone. or, if not undone, what was left me bleeding. haunted by what we never finished, i guess i did those things alone and you were a dull blip on the radar, not so important anymore. until you decided to slam shut one more door.

i've got something worse than swine flu, seems I can't get rid of you. I'm infected with something in my heart, haven't forgotten your hands in my hair, on my back. I'd rather be sick and done with it a week later, puke my guts out in a bucket on the floor, and smell and sweat and stew in my own miseries for a week of hot and cold sweats, feeling lonely. It'd be over after a week, maybe two, and I'd rise from bed a little bit frail, pale, frazzled. It's so much better to be really sick than to have this disease. I need some kind of cure to get you off my mind. Do they have a shot for that kind of thing?

teach me teacher teach me anything. i can't teach you what you will need to know i don't know what you will need or what you will know. the world will not be the same now, ever again the world is so tilted, so introverted that i can't listen to the sounds of birds can't listen to the sounds of the creatures beneath the ground. those were the old ways of seeing and no one cares for that these days.

Shams, A beast in me arose and spit fire and has taken hold of me like a demon a demon, Shams, a demon. It might be the medication that makes my heart race, as I lazily watch a halluciation in my fever make circles spirit across the white walls. But, the appeal of a demon is so much greater than to cast this mundane, sniffling, aching, misery into something so abstract as a virus.

i delighted at that news delighted that i knew the news would come eventually. and delighted that you are now hurting and that is so not like me. i guess you got me real good real, real good.

i feel awe that you are not my friend

oh to be so less alone tis so tedious sometimes when busy with others I crave you so, but when busy with none, je le detest.

sometimes I come back to you, and I twirl a strand of hair around my finger, and think, why?

sometimes the best part of the day is when I put my feet up sometimes

french, t'es si difficile si une mistress sans le bon sense de rester avec moi dans ma tete. j'oublie tout, tout, tout les mots anglais, les mots francias, tout dans le noir une espace qui grandir

there is is a place where I go that is is a place where I go that is is a place where I go and I write in these circles and I wonder sometimes that maybe sometimes that maybe you love me.

for all the love I never had and all the love I lost, I would like to get it back before this life is tossed.

kiss kiss

Would there be a motzart if austria had antidepressants, and should I wipe my memory if I had the chance not of the memories, but of the emotional component. Why when depressed do I draw so much better, and why when depressed does my mind ruminate over and over on details that I write and why when not depressed do I just function and not care about drawing or writing? Or do I? How much is my own myth making, my own sense of my own Motzart?

the blind guy is reading a book, and sometimes he turns his face towards me, as if he could see me. Maybe he can.

He says that to be born again, you must die first. How long until I am able to die, or rather kill, these feelings that still cling to me, like hard, sharp barnacles? I can not pry them from me or torch them or freeze them. they stay attached, simple and eternal, shells that need not a living being to stay on my rocks. All the same, I forget they are there or maybe they are not there, and for a time, they can not cut my feet or my hands. It is so much easier for so many others. They just find someone else, and within months have moved on. Easy swimmers who float with the tide, from one wave to the next, one beach to the next. Today, the barnacles were back, as I fantasized a scenario of ten years ahead in which he returns, and I said, I have two kids now. I am married. But we had an affair anyway.

today we are 100 shams 100 poems some good, some bad how does it feel? we were depressed, we got better. we loved, we lost. we have not loved since, though perhaps we pine a bit we are still seeking, shams, still hoping, still looking, still trying to make sense of the world. I'm glad I have you, Shams, so glad.

it takes so much to hold my shoulder in this crunched place. And when I finally move it, heat. The heat. I wear this emotion on my body. And I break this emotion by opening my body.

I loved the artist, not the man, and I just can't seem to stop loving the artist and ignoring the man.

in my head is a constant scream sometimes that is so loud and so negative I want to stick a plunger in one ear, and push it down or pull it out. Life is not fair, life is not fair, life is not fair.

I take so much comfort from the fact that I know you always come back to the same place. Even if we don't have that kind of relationship.

how can i explain this, to you. This is what I'm thinking, thinking about the long lashed boy and his chasm of need so deep that I still haven't heard the coin I dropped in. He's alright, you know. He's alright. So what if he gets mad when I take the local and he's on the express. Not my problem. Or is it? I don't really care, and that's where I have to answer to my conscience. Remedy this, it says. But I still dream of him and I tell myself, even in those dreams, you're not allowed here anymore, we don't have that kind of relationship anymore. I guess those energies go somewhere though. I am so glad I have my divinity. We are so small, our concerns so small, so not truly of ourselves, manifestations of that divinity, acting out divine things through energy concentrations. To me it makes perfect sense.

We sat politely, talking as people do on first dates, as this has been one in a string of about ten or twenty. I'm so weary and bored of the task of finding love. If only it would find me first, and put to rest the labor. Feeling nothing on date number one, and not excited, enough to go on date number two but I must. It takes me many weeks to feel a pull. I like artists best. Sitting and waiting, oh did I feel a pull for The man with the giant beard and the book at the next table and I wanted to say to him, good sir, let us leave together and find stars and fill our pockets with stars and dine at night and sing songs to the wind and the wolves and the crickets. But my first date came and the good sir he left. I kept his smile in my pocket all night, and pulled it out in my dreams.

there's little I wouldn't catch or keep, penning my heart up like a sheep wandering to greener fields lest there is a greater yield

your last refuge in my life is in my dreams. only there are you a physical presence, who cradles me, and then disappears. We start in a tent, in a park, or we start on a train, and all is bliss, all is love. Then you leave or disappear while I am occupied with something else. I look for you until I wake, look for clues to understand. The story has told itself in anagrams and symbols, myth and picture. So I lived my life for two months, studying the same facts with a ferocious obsessiveness that bordered on madness. Or was madness. No pressure of my mind would loosen my tight grasp. I suffered. Oh how I suffered. But now, my waking life is mine again, and I am not sure how I managed to fit so much of you into my day, into my very breath. You are gone at last, I am free at last.

More than anything, I would like us to watch the stars.

he's looking at me with these big doe eyes, batting his lashes. I'm thinking, he's like a girl. He's in love with me. Lately, seems like everyone is in love with me. Except, of course. As I sit, book in hand, I try to look him in the eye, give him the kind of treatment I would like. He's not so bad. He's just not. And I'm not sure if I weren't so haunted I would like him. There's got to be some kind of route to bring us back, I'm thinking. No matter how many variations, we all get to the same outcome.

my love for you is big and grand, and ocean wide. I can drown all your sorrows in my sea, and cradle you when you cry tears that don't fall. Water can't get wet. You can walk in from the shore, toes, shins, knees, until at last you are past the depth where you can stand. My love is bigger than you, silly man, silly silly man. Float with your arms stretched wide, vulnerable to sun, to wind, to birds. I will never drop you.

is listening to my

alone in the car, silently screaming, troubled by troubles without any meaning

Please save me. Please be around for the rest of my life. Let tomorrow be the start.

dreaming while napping, sometimes elapsing time goes much faster when I sleep on the couch, dazed from my dreams, frustrated and aroused.

stupid obsessive bone gnawing heart, if not one boy then another. So it seems to be, each one replacing the next. I guess it is worse when there is nothing, just empty beating, empty waiting. At least the energies go somewhere. But for this one, no good will come of this one. He's poison in the open sore. Let it go, stupid heart, stop being such a dog with an oversize bone with no marrow in it. I don't know why its so hard to let go of things that are not good for me, serve no purpose, and hurt moment after moment. It could not be more clear. I might feel the tightness in my jaw starting to slacken, because I hear the voice of another, calling me out.

Forget all love, I'd rather play; dance and draw and laugh all day; explore the world ashore asea, I wish a companion to discover me.

it would be an honor to kiss the tips of your fingers.

I didn't care, they think. or they didn't know. She fingered a strand of plastic beads and stretched them out from her neck and looked at them. Why not do it yourself? she said. They all say that. As if it were like trying to decide whether to eat Chinese or Thai or to ride a bike or walk.

been days, I been here, been weeks, but not months. Doctor's trying to dose me up and I don't 'preciate that. Like he should understand, that maybe I need more time, or just a threat of more dosing. Well, he doubled up anyway, but he's a pill pusher, no time to sit and talk and ob-ser-vate. Gotta pull myself up and out of this place, squeezing myself out of the hole. I'm half out, you know, but I'm stuck at the waist. Pushing myself up with my hands and I'd kick with my legs, only hole's all filled with dirt now. Not much of a hole anymore. Maybe the bottom will drop out again, but I doubt it. Took me a long holiday from responsibilities. Took me a long holiday from people. That's the privilege of being a little sick sometimes. You get a respite, though it doesn't quite feel like that. In fact, just getting out of bed feels like a chore. Not screaming is the real chore. All I want to do is scream so loud those days and scream and scream and screa...

I ran until I found the place, touched the stars, touched my face, Vapor trails of blood and air, I wove daisies in your hair.

I ran until I found him or what was him at some other point before he exploded into vapor and blood. I kissed my hand, and touched the place he had been, and somewhere, sometime, our lips met.

Saved by wind, saved by boats, I need to learn to stay afloat. Hold my breath and pass this by, swim until I learn to fly.

SHams, I ain't gots no poems today, shams, but I has got me an ache that itches and throbs. I'll tell you about the coincidence, or better put co -in -side-ance, or maybe co-ink-a-dance. But for a moment, there was a hope, that was dashed with the quiet echoing of my feet, in the hall. are echoes quiet? are empty halls? I swear I wasn't hearing things. But then again, there are these parallel worlds.

I throw up my arms, throw up and grab for the rope that will pull me out of this mess. I can't seem to get out of my own head, can't seem to get out of this cycle of thoughts that is pulling me to its centre vortex, without ceasing. I'm going down the drain to the pipes, but I'm too big I get stuck, but I spin in place. If only I knew how to end you. This might be what grief looks like. And maybe it is good to experience death many times before death so it isn't such a shock when it comes.

Dear pillow, You are so sexy in the afternoon. Let's nap, eat cookies in bed, and make out again soon. Love, Rachel (it rhymes. it qualifies)

don't kill the buddha on the road. its a trap. have him for tea, sing him a song, ask him to join you, he'll come along. give him some beers, dance hand in hand, whisper to each other, and have some McDonalds. stand on your hands, poster the city, draw your feet, and go rollerblading. bike if you must, or take the train, ride in a car, a tractor a plane. read some books, paint on your body, listen to birds, listen to birds. hug a tree kiss a worm, and catch something alive and let it go. like a fish in the sea swim to the other side, get him a guest pass, and climb. i couldn't be bother to write so many rhymes, of what I could do with the buddha should I meet him on the road. But I'll tell you this, I wouldn't kill him, even if he killed me first.

Ghosts in the machine, lost in Lachine, driving past places of Nord Montreal, can y'all find me along the canal? *********************************** Went searching you see for the ghosts in the machine and found none but heard them banging on the pipes and wires, knew they'd been there before and everywhere. I swung round with my torch and saw bats hanging in places that hadn't been touched and I am worried that maybe just maybe I need to burn the place down before I go back again.

would try anew to paint my heart, things that end or never start, replace the promise of my stars, unlucky in love, good at cards.

thank you for my eyes, I say, thank you for my eyes, I'm not the man I used to be. (M.S.) If not for art and writing, would I be silent in the universe? Passing down concrete halls and the chatter of thousands who muttered their messages in places I might have heard some of them, but with so many of them talking, I need to drown it out with total oceans of silence, a wall of silence, or maybe just the birds. But if I leave something of me behind, or something of mine, am I still there? Today I thought if I snatch a baby I will become a mother and I can raise that child to stand on two feet and stretch with both hands up and pull the rope and climb higher than I ever have been and see more than I ever will see. When my time comes, and I have met my love, I will never take him for granted, not one day, not one moment, not once, because I waited so long for this and waited so long and waited so and waited and.

I saw a ghost in the wall captured in the brick and the paint and his name written in graffiti scrawl. I hadn't seen him in a long time, and most of the ghosts have become whispers as people forget them. It was a hall of ghosts on the back wall by an alley, pointing the way for me to dream or dare.

It reminds me of when I liked the scientist who lived in my dorm, and he knew about Plato too. He was a tall guy, rough around the edges, not thin, but manly. His roommates thought he was weird, but I thought he was beautiful. I could smell him from across a room, and I wanted to touch him. Constantly. We wrestled on the couches in the common room and he smeared frosting over my face once and we laughed and just once we kissed. just once. late at night. the girl down the hall who hated all the other girls. They drank vodka one night while I stayed behind to study biology and he fell for her, her exotic ways, her esotericism, things I never could be. I sat on the steps one night, and listened to them talking in the common room. My heart broke so hard, I didn't have the energy to leave.

to live dangerously, like me, you must, eat fruit without washing the peel, try new things especially technological ones, think you are sexy at any size, flirt online first, walk your dog in pyjamas, leave notes on cars, write poems, fall in love often, and love with all your heart. If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

If you knew how much I think of you still, you would be unhappy, maybe even disturbed. But I suppose that is what we ask of everyone we have left behind. Don't think of me, forget me, let me go, get on with your life. I am sure you would shut me out of the access points if you were aware, that I spent time with your internet presence. If only it were so easy to let go! The facts of the situation were quite clear and there they were, spread out like a fan of cards on the table. Gin. Rummy. But there was something in the player that I never understood, something that let you win the game, and play me like that. I never let myself form an opinion of you, because I knew it was not easy to get inside. But I never got inside. You slamemd every door shut that I opened, pushed me to the ground like a defiant child, with unexpected roughness. Stunned, then gaining my composure, I unfolded the paper in my hands and read the same facts again and again. Memorized them. Studied them. Tried to m...

would it be so bad to be a suicide girl? not someone who commits suicide, of course, but someone cute and sexy with dyed hair and tattoos on my body. I can't commit to those things, save for being sexy and cute, which I am even if I am not naked on a webpage.

I thought, Shams, that we should dedicate the month of August to things august, the gods in heaven, the gods in my heart, the God of my religion, the God in our souls. I had such a great idea for a poem, Shams, and I lost it on the canal. It drifted away, with duck feet.

how long until you no longer visist my screaming mind, until I stop paying homage at your shrine, thinking, you would have liked this, you should have been here, we should have been. there's no one else now, but I can't wait until I've erased your presence from my house.

i saw you in standing on a piece of wood and you had the biggest clumsiest feet I'd ever seen. let's be lovers, you and I.

been on a lot of dates, Shams, don't even know how to put it into a poem because every date is a poem, every person a soul of the same soul, looking to find its way back to itself. But in the meantime, we're all wanting some heart stirring connection, and hoping to find it in one another. I'm not sure how you get from that first meeting to love, or if it awakens upon first meeting or never comes. I've never been so good at this. And I hate drinking.

worst relationship I ever had. probably not ever, but certainly in recent memory. he went cold. it wasn't me. it was you. i knew you were a train wreck and I should have jumped.

I couldn't believe it, but the day came and I felt like I wanted to be in the world again. I only hope it lasts more than a few hours. If it doesn't, I know it will come back anyway.

I saw you walking here, he tells me, a stocky guy, maybe four months ago. Bearded? Tall? I say, but I know who he means. I laugh when he nods. Day one of an adventure that ended too soon and broke me. He mentions a girl he knows from my neighborhood, in too many details, too many times, and I know we braided parallel strands of our lives, only to meet at last in this Asian restaurant, eating the best Pad Thai I have ever eaten. I'll show you something, I tell him, with a shrimp in the chopsticks. I want to show him the path I tread without saying the words, but I am still constructing and repacking the experience in my head, finding a story I can live with. The meaninglessness of my shattered glass heart is not fit for consumption. I take him to my urban forest of tags and pictures and He asks me if I am ever afraid to be in this desolate place.

Still in the hole, I suppose, But closer to the top, and I'm sweating my way to the finish here. That may just be the summer.

Sum of my equation, I got to you through a series of intersecting parallel lines and used a shaky hand and a straight edge to draw what was in my imagination out on lined looseleaf. I want to divide and multiply by a factor of two, subtract all the things that shouldn't be there. The unknowns are killing me. Let's not make it so complicated, because the universal rules are simple. I'll be a piece of your pi, if you'll be a piece of mine, and when you add us together, we'll see everything in the cosmos, perfect assymetrical beauty, radiating from the dust of stars, ever and ever.

big eyes, I've got big eyes and they take in all the colors of the walls. the city kisses me a thousand times with rain that soaks through my jacket, through my shorts, through my heart. Please get out of my heart already.

I take small scraps of identities you wore, and finger them in my pocket, while I sit at a table, facing a man who is telling me his life story. I make conversation from these cheat sheets, speaking as though the things I learned from you were things I knew years ago. I am profiling my partners against your standard, looking for a duplicate in all respects but the one that matters: you didn't like me enough. But don't worry. This man or the next or the one after that, will replace you. Until I find the one who has a profile sheet that I match to the letter.

I'm so pretty, I know, and not very exotic, but pretty with red hair, turning white at the temples, and that's pretty too. I have big, round eyes, a thousand expressions cross my face, and I've gotten used to my smile's effects, on me, on others. I'm smart and I'm kind, pure of heart, because all things are pure to the pure of heart. I see the good in everyone. I have ambitions, positivity, gentleness, determination, and I forgive all their faults, all their imperfections, and edges. I love my emotional richness, and my gifts, my talents, and my thirst for doing new things imperfectly. I am so perfect, just as I am, exactly as I am. I am a thousand past lives, blurred by a finger through wet paint, smearing all the details. When they leave, they say you are pretty, you are awesome, you are smart, you are kind, and someone will be lucky to have you. Someone. Anyone?

Goethe and I, we met through a misquotation, and when I looked, I found the wrong man. But what I found in Goethe, lasted longer. On days like today, or yesterday, or the day before that, I put stock in my boldness and invite Providence to move the gates that block my way. Marcus told me I only need throw my hat over the wall. Shams, what do you think? Can I afford to toss this thing and see where I end up?

jealousy, old friend, we rarely have tea anymore. you were a lousy companion in my youth, cause of a thousand missteps, each pace until I left you on the road. When I sleep, though, the herd of turtles carry me on their backs, and you transformed them into a flock of cedar waxwings, that my lover and his new lover saw at the point of the island. She wrote to him in a message about the cedar waxwings. How beautiful it was to see them together. And the next day I realized it was all you, old friend, old trickster, whispering your poison in my ears, throwing corpses into the well.

these things i wanted to say bouncing around in my head beautiful words that were seeping out in the cracks of my eyes as tears on my cheeks. But then, when it came time, and I saw you in front of me, and I opened up, from my heart and out came the sounds, You put your hand across my face over my mouth. You were stronger, you were bigger, and you were cold. The residence of my former lover, was now occupied by you, and you'd trimmed his hair and I didn't like it. The words I had stayed caged inside, fluttering around and banging hard against the walls of my mind, furious at their captivity, furious with their captor. My words belonged to another man, who died when plantmania did, and I am glad you never got to hear them.

feels so good to be in my skin, to have comets in my solar plexus and stars in my spine. feels better than a rock concert, or a trip to the moon. I am all of you.

This ship is crashing every day and I can't seem to steer her right just yet.

And indeed, I closed my eyes, and even while with someone else, I was with someone else.

Best to let an ex be an ex, with a question mark left at the end of his story, and write down that he has gone on to live an ordinary life and do ordinary things. Tell yourself he is up to the same things, night after night, day after day, just playing video games or drinking, and forget the fact that he's in love and he loves what he does and was another version of your better self, taken from you without your consent. How did you manage to think alike, yet come to such different conclusions? Best to forget him and get on with your days, and fill them with cannoli cream, and sprinkles, and chocolate chips, because if you figure out he is happy, and that you didn't matter, and that he is in love, and you aren't, and that he didn't care about you, and you cared about him, and that he became everything you hoped to be with him, while you remained mired, angry, frustrated... I can assure you it isn't going to be a good day. So don't even bother to look any which wa...

you are loved much more than you know. much more deeply more widely more evervescently if i could kiss your fingertips with the grace of a butterfly even those would penetrate through you and live on your body like a shadow following you and putting down a carpet of stars for you to walk on

I am waiting for your letter, just so I can run my finger over the stamp that you placed carelessly and smell your words up close, words you wrote, words you never said. In my mind you have become something you never were, and I am afraid you are a better man to my mind that you ever were. It's funny, Shams, what has happened. You're laughing at me and my dramatic way of taking a hit on the side of the head, or a quick knife in my ribs. Shams, stop it, stop it, stop it. You're right that I need to stop this moping about over a boy, and hiding like I will never get over him. Oh, Shams, I just want him to send me that letter and love me again. He was illiterate in love anyway, what could his stupid letter have possibly said to capture my heart. I should have run like hell when he first made his case, instead of finding all kinds of justifications and using my mildness, my gentleness, to force myself to make his excuses for a half lived life. I did it so well, I believed them ...

He wrote messages to me on the walls of the buildings, and if I climbed the fire escape of the tenement I knew the kids in the too small blue shirts would be playing on the fire escape by hanging off the sides as if they never fell. I walked onto the roof and crouched down next to the words he had left for me there, and pressed my cheek to the wall where his hands had been, and tried to press his ghosts into me, as if it were a substitute for the real thing. The message was a map to the heart of the jungle, and somewhere there, I would find exactly what I was looking for. I was either going to fight or let it go. A sparrow landed with a sprig of olive in its mouth, from the far off island of the blessed, and I knew the clouds were never able to alter the sky, only obscure it, temporarily.

I'm tearing strips out of the sky, Ripping down stars and comets, In great ribbons. I'm trying to get to find someone out there, anyone out there, who can hear me. With both hands I grab on and yank at the fabric of the cosmos. I stand up to my knees in peelings, because this seems to go on, unendingly, like the universe.

I keep asking the same questions. I keep getting the same answers. I KNOW ALREADY. I KNOW. I don't need to ask anymore. You're not coming back. It's been a week, and not a word. I KNOW ALREADY. I KNOW. How did I find out? We were so different to each other, but not so different from each other. I asked myself what I would do. I wouldn't even turn around to glance. I would be setting my watch for the next time zone, skipping my way from here to there, singing aloud and swinging my arms. One week, it's been. One long week. I am seizing my weeks. Tomorrow I will drag myself back on my feet and out of this hoodie. I will make myself go through normal life. After awhile, my life without you will be normal life. Though it may take me longer since I'm dragging my heels.

I start in the hole every day, with a ladder, a ration of food, and the day ahead. It starts like a riddle, with a shadow of a man, and a broken lightbulb only its my heart instead. What happened? Puzzles aren't my thing. If I ask the right questions, I'll get to the solution. But my questions are off track and I don't know the ones to ask. And when I climb up the ladder, even on the top rung, I still can't reach the surface. The more I struggle, the deeper the hole gets, such is my perception. The less I struggle, the deeper the hole gets. As long as I hope, I am trapped. Equanimity now, Shams, equanimity. Because hope is harder than diamonds, more eternal than space. It can not be destroyed, only changed like energy. One form into the next. I need to hope for something else. But, every day, the hole fills itself, and the race is on, and I'll be on the surface before I know it, but I can't get there soon enough.

I've got a nine hour drive ahead of me and the radio's saying thunder showers all day, the whole ride down. The New York state throughway is flying by me on either side, not that I drive fast, and my attention floats between the cars ahead, the cars behind, and the little yellow and purple flowers bobbing their heads as the rain hammers them. The grey sky brings out the technicolor richness. The clouds are moving in herds across the horizon. I haven't skipped through the songs on the CD player, just let album bleed into album. I shouldn't be so broken hearted over this, but I know it will take me a few weeks to shake off the grief. I feel as though someone just swatted a fledgling who fell from the nest, killing it before it even had the chance to sing. I'm such a dreamer to think I could have saved this bird when it had such a faint heartbeat and its first feathers started falling out in my hands.

I know I am a silly girl wanting silly things when I want you to come back. But, if I could have things my way, you would come back, and beg. And I could say, I need to think about it, but in reality I thought about it and I would say yes. Then you would be back, and we would be able to go on a picnic or go camping or do all the things I thought we might do together. I'd even play games. I wanted you to ask me. I was waiting for you to ask me. I think I would like that. I was waiting then, like I'm waiting now. You never asked then, so why would you now? I've asked everyone, but everyone is pretty sure that there's nothing to be done about the matter.

As soon as I stopped adding water to your powder, I was no longer able to reconstitute you. You were the memory of a flavor or of a smell, and I could not bring you to my mind any longer, as a sensation in words is just an intellectual exercise. My sadness these days is not over you. You did not even exist in my life. I will bleach you from my memories, and you will fade, nameless, faceless. No, my sadness is for the things I have wanted, for the happiness that came out for me, and my delight and my hopes, that floated me through the day, like a thousand balloons tied to my bed. I soared up and up, in full command of the world below, and nothing bad could touch me. I was mighty mighty up on high. I was in my best element, the air, the wind, and I felt secure and safe and free. That same happiness is still in me, but it seems to be locked away, and its absence makes the days seem so dreary and long. So don't worry about my tears, Shams. Frustration always makes me cry. I just need t...

I saw it coming like the 6 a.m. from Halifax across the flat plains of Southern New Brunswick, steam and the steady rumble filling the bay. Lying in my bed, under three blankets, and hood pulled up, pillows around me, dog at my feet, books crashing down on either side and pens and paper. I didn't know what time it would arrive. And I was too happy to care, even though I was a destination station. It crashed through the wall, and squealed to a stop, Inches from me, and I was pinned in place, lights in my eyes, As the facts were laid out. The facts. Just the facts, ma'am. Tell me again, I said, because I was too stunned to hear them once. Wasn't the train I expected. This one was driven by a ghost, and I can't fight the supernatural. I am flesh and blood, my feet touch the ground, and stars leak out of my spine when I walk. My angel wings only come out on special occasions, but I am always capable of extraordinary grace. My love was onboard, demonically changed, a ghost h...

Schrodinger's Cat, that's what I am in this box, Both alive and dead at the same time. But even with the box open, I'm still both. I want to and I don't.

Throw that Kong, buddy, and I'm going to find it, bring it back, drop it, roll on it, push my teeth into it, and show it to all the other dogs. That big stupid lab is going to bound over with his rolls of skin, and try to take it from me, but I'm not letting go, not for that doofus, with his stupid name, and his stupider owner, and her high pitched ear splitting voice, as she's telling everyone about her wax job. Maybe I'll let him have it, just for a moment, because he has to live with her, and hear her talk about her wax job at least five or six times a day for the next week or so. Here, take it, or maybe you got it fair and square, you big dumb lab big dumb doofus. No, wait, changed my mind, because you're getting that Iams breath all over my Kong and the doberman, that bitch, will take it from you.

Every dog has its day, so I am told, but I am more certain that every dog has a day of death and we all die too young. Don't be afraid, old girl, you can wait for her on the other side, so that when her time comes, her best friend is waiting.

So, I've decided to give myself a new poetry project for July. I managed to keep Sham's Muse going for the month, so time to spread my wings. July's project is to write poems that come from other people's heads... In other words, I'm going to write poems as if I were someone else.

end of the month, time to check my pulse, check my bank accounts, sort and organize, put it all in some kind of better order. take stock of things and clear the clutter. time to move forward, get rid of what isn't coming to the next month, keep what is defining. time to change the poetry project, time to change the situation, time to get out, before it pulls me down, time to diagnose, and listen to what the good doctor says. it isn't there, baby. it isn't there. you want to spend six months or a year running in a gerbil wheel, be my guest. your legs will get strong, for when you turn your head, and realize there is a desert out there and your legs are going to carry you from one end to the oasis.

He asked me if I were free that afternoon, or any afternoon, and then added mornings and evenings, even midnights or sunrises. My pick. At one time, I waited for his offer with the casual indifference of a cat watching a mouse catch his breath behind a heavy piece of furniture. Eventually he's coming out, it requires a certain amount of attention, but not so much that he feels he's too closely guarded to move again. Lick my paws, wipe my whiskers, but never turn off the radar in my ears, every hair pointed. He tapped me again. He was on the move. I hedged between two heartbeats. A heartbeat. What damage could be done? Who would ever know? I've got my pride. Another heartbeat. But I also have someone, even though he doesn't love me, true, but he might. One day. If I don't do stupid things like entertain old friends in inappropriate tete a deux. Another heartbeat. Didn't I want this once? Don't I want to be a Helen? Didn't we have fun, you and I? Aren...

on mouse feet, love came, and bit my ankle.

I have no problem with confusing love and sex, as I've been told that they can be the same thing for some people, just not for me. Let's mix it up, you and I, a little love, a little sex, and make it something extraordinary, the kind of thing everyone envies.

he left behind an empty bottle of dr. pepper and a copy of the Montreal Mirror open to the page with ads for transsexuals, massage parlors, and sasha's sex advice column for a woman seeking breast implants. i fell asleep on the pillow where he didn't nap on my couch and woke up at 2 a.m. thinking that it would be nicer if he left himself

There are three witches in the back of my head Brewing trouble, making trouble, always trouble. They whisper there, you don't matter to him, why be such a dumb loyal dog? He'll eat you alive, and leave no bones for the collector, they say, and you will have to be reborn again in our pot, given now a criminal's heart, a murdresses' spleen, and you will be a monster of our making. Then they dance around, their arms wild and high, laughing and blowing fire out their eyes. Poor me, poor me under their spell, uncertain and afraid, curled in a ball, no defense against their torments, Save for my righteous conscience, that would rather I suffer indignity than do indignity to another. I've always loved you Socrates, my unkempt brother through generations. It does not help that you do not give me your words, the vaccine against witches' poison and defenses against their dark arts. It does not help that you might, for all I divine, feel nothing for all I feel something. I...

Hey there poqueteers, Anyway, I've slacked off on sham's muse for some reason or other. Poetry projects can be really tough to sustain because I am not much of a poet and I'm embarrassed how bad of a writer I can be. It is very discouraging to read drivel and think to myself that I'm just being self-absorbed. On the other hand, everything comes with practice. Writing is a practice. So, each poem is a practice, and also kind of an exercise in my writer's mind. If I don't exercise my writing skills daily, well, I feel it. So, I have to write every day, whether here in Sham's Muse or in my own fictional world. I realize the public nature of this blog means that my "practice" is visible to the world at large. So, I want to apologize to anyone who happens upon this blog and thinks that I would be better off storing this stuff privately. Trust me, I write far more than I scribble down here -- I just put little poems that come off the top of my head an...

i travelled so many places alone, putting one foot in front of the other, on the road, thinking i would come to know something more about myself or the universe or why I held onto you for so long. carrying a book you bought me that i read and re-read, like it was the kabbalah and the codes would spell out the right thing to do for us. i read and re-read your letter written in my diary, diving our future together, like the Delphic oracle that no one understood until a mighty empire fell, King Croesus of Lydia. now i have a house and a couch, a dog and a wok, that i bought with money i saved, a paycheck at a time. in my diary, at one time, i wanted to say i did this without you. i never needed you, and you could be an ant. but i dream different dreams, and i wouldn't throw myself over for anyone anymore, not like i did for you. and i say now i did this myself, i need me, and i love myself. i wrote a diary once, when i was someone else, walking on the road, and i forgot everything, un...

I'm 8 feet up on this ladder, but I've got good balance and I don't look down long enough to feel afraid. My drill and two bits, a hammer and a bunch of screws rest on the perch as I manouevre myself to attach the curtain rod brackets. Screws in my mouth, in my pocket, the screwdriver in my sweaty hand, leaving dirty palm prints on the white walls. The rod is up, and only I see that the last bracket is crooked, and that I couldn't get all the anchors in. My curtains hang, not really one I like; I didn't make them myself. It looks okay. It will do in a pinch. It blocks the light, and more appropriately, blocks my neighbors' gaze. The free show is over, my friends. Nothing to see here anyway. I do so many things myself, so many things that want for a good man who can do them better. But I would gladly continue to do these things, if the good man who is mine can't.

I thought for a moment that I would not keep my secrets, and spill everything out like the broken levees of New Orleans, and let you help me pile back the sandbags, one at a time, a single team with a common goal. But for all that, I need secrets to begin with. ****** (some alternative verses started considered) I thought for a moment that I would let you in, and seriously consider your input on the decision, because ultimately, we're both effected, and I can compromise sometimes. Just sometimes. I thought for a moment that I would ask you what to do, and you could tell me and I would listen,

I have no poems today, Shams, None at all, I'm kind of upended and

My favorite mug from Ralph Lauren Home has the stripes but not the stars, an Outlet find from Long Island's Eastern distant otherworld. The coaster from the box bookstore's attempt to capitalize on everyday luxuries, soy candles, storage boxes, and Montessori toys. Not bought on sale, but a considered rarity in my life, a purchase of delight in aesthetics, in self-love, a practice of giving to myself. The steam still rises up in periodic puffs, an ant's foggy day, Maybe a little too much sugar, a little too much milk, cane sugar crystalized from the plant, organic milk, which I must hunt to find in health food stores that stay shy of walking distance. The tea is top shelf, overpriced and imported, a tea I'd never buy for myself, but given to me as a gift by someone whose name I forgot and whose existence I forgot, given when he wanted to flash me his tail. I forgot about this tea, stuffed behind extra boxes of Nature's Path cereals, shuffled behind stocked cans of o...

Just when I think I have it in hand, I want to step out in front of a bus. Will the distance between me and happiness be a graph that never reaches zero? The denominator of the fraction growing larger and larger, so that I can not touch it even though we are a breath apart? The closer I come, the further away I get? The destination is the same for all of us. We all die in the end, Shams. There is nothing to worry about succeed, fail, help, harm. We all die. We all die in the end. I inhaled a rose, before it shed its petals, and I thought to myself, I care far too much about what the end will be, I need to know how it will end, lest I worry about the end the whole journey. The journey is the joyful part, the journey is why we pick our destination. We want the journey. This is a lame poem, Shams. I might have outdone myself this time.

She is wearing false moth wing eyelashes, and a headband with horns, because she is in the band that plays at midnight. And he is plainer than day, so to speak, but has nice blue eyes and doesn't smoke. She kisses him with her eyes and he complains he feels creeped out. They're on crooked, he says, and she agrees. What can she do now. So it is with them, before and after, the secrets of happy couples. They hold hands, fingers touching at the tips, and she rocks back on her heels, balancing like that, looking at each other as their fingertips press and pull in opposite directions. Balancing like that, with the kind of love I envy, with the kind of love I admire.

I was wrong. Inside is not a crystal forest, But a solar system, a universe, expanding, unending. My interior not closed like an unopened geode, But filling the interstitial spaces, and so big beyond my comprehension. Somehow I evolved, from simple to more complex, but still beautiful, more beautiful now, and the subtle vibrations, are in every atom, in every cell, and I might be someone else by the end of the day.

I would like to kick this house of cards over. I built it so carefully, so slowly. As I contemplated the best place to plant my foot, A theif came, and stole all the diamonds. Didn't expect that one, did you?

Alexandra, you stooped to kiss his ass, And took a hoof to your face. Your face will recover, but he will always be an ass.

Shams, Shams, Oh Shams, I hang my head in shame, dear dearest Shams. What is it with me, with my stupid stupid heart? It goes all over the place, like a stray dog, looking for a cut of meat that it can sink into, with its fangs and claws, tearing off strips and licking its chops with glutton's delight. Why can't it just sit and be still, like the mystics, and meditate on the nature of God, or whirl in place in its own ecstatic dance, white tent-like robes and ruby crusted sleeves? Shams, Oh Shams, Shams, My muse, my poet, my inspiration, I would like to gouge it from me and all the trouble it brings, bubbling and pulsing, clutching and conniving, all those pains. So much better I would be if it were caged, if it weren't allowed to pounce on my chest, and look me in the eye. Dear dearest Shams, I am made of the dust of time immemorial as are you, as are we all, so why can't I have that perspective instead?

The spike in my shoulder is an old injury a blocked channel, I am sure, even though I believe in Western medicine, and take Ibuprofen to mask flare ups. But there is a deeper wisdom of the body, a knowing of injustices, a containing of toxic spills, a place where the not forgetting, but the learning to live without, must be contained. Radioactive decay in my shoulder, as particle by particle, the pain breaks down over a lifetime and a half unless I find remediation for my own superfund site to speed the healing. The clean up is simple: the drunken forgetfulness of infatuation anesthetizes me, while the good doctor does his work. He wrings my liver of its mistrust, my kidneys of their rage. He incises the cancers of sorrow and suffering with deft hand, with a love that does not end no matter my pessimisms.

He works two jobs, Has two girlfriends, One English, one French. I ask him if they know each other, and he ignores the question.

Transcendence means nothing to you, and miracles can be explained by sound principles, calculated in logic and reason and the math to back it up. Religion is an opiate, and we don't need God to be good. The meaning of life? It comes down to a formula. Probabilities, perhaps. Life after death? Consolation. (bleh, this poem is so bleh. I had an idea, but I lost it...)

I breathe you in my mind, your spectrum of scent, Nosing along the grass, among earthworms and leaves returning to humus. Pushing in close to the junction of the fence and ground, Tasting the minerals as I inhale you, a light on my tongue, and I scratch the dirt with a paw, pushing away everything that is not your flesh. You were here, but gone. And I breathe you in my mind again, temporarily calling up the touch of your lips to the pads of my fingers, spiraling along in a slug trail up the stems and through the thorns. I don't need to see what I can smell. Hermes gave me a bitch's mind, cunning and yearning, And the gods rained gifts upon my head, Aphrodite charm. Athena dextrous hands. Lovely in body, lovely in voice, At Zeus' request, a curse for fire's theft. (end with translation of Hesiod's W&D -- a few lines???)