Shams' Muse

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.