Can you tell I like alliteration? This is a work in progress as I add more and more of my writings.
Boundaries
I am the one who won’t shut up
Won’t play nice or compromise
Will look you in the eyes
Say No to your face
Won’t let you replace my truth
With your lies.
I will not capitulate or
State how I would like to
But cannot
But will tell you I have other things to do
Which include
Being alone with my thoughts
I will not let you interrupt
Will disrupt your attempts
To talk over me
Remind you that I am speaking
Continue as if you are just another
Wall to break through.
Offering
“Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
–David Buckel, civil rights lawyer and environmentalist, before setting himself on fire
What would it take to contemplate
one’s own immolation
To set upon a course of action
Call the world’s attention
To the planet’s imminent death from suffocation
To gather the tools
The fuel the lighter
Choose a place you are not likely to be seen
but soon found
A field not likely to catch fire
The ground not so dry it will scorch like tinder
Once you have doused yourself
Lit the torch
Touched it to yourself
Your last image is a field burning
Your body the residue the farmer is removing
Preparing the ground for new life
Smoking in the Dark
It’s what my mother did
After my brother and I had gone to bed
She listened to melancholy eight-track songs
The Carpenters’ “Superstar”
Dionne Warwick singing, “Walk On By”
Neil Diamond’s “Love On The Rocks”
She slept on the couch in the living room
In the two-bedroom apartment she found
When we moved from California back to her hometown
after the divorce
Sometimes at night I’d get out of bed
Make my way to the bathroom
That orange glow on her cigarette’s tip and
The green light on the stereo
The only light to guide me
Travels, Travails, and Triumphs in Writing 