Day Thirty: Endings and Beginnings

GROWING TOO FAST
 
The three year old boy moved
from the toddler room, where
he had spent almost all of his life,
to the preschool room, where the kids
were bigger and tougher.
They tripped him and pinched him,
called him a baby,
and snatched food from his plate at snack time.
Barely out of diapers, he had to wait
in long lines of obscenely squirming bodies
for a chance at the toilet,
which all of them forgot to flush.
At nap time, he cried quietly,
but the teachers were rubbing the backs
of the children who made the most fuss,
leaving him to fend for himself.
Sometimes he looked out the back door
at his old companions in the toddler yard,
climbing on a small, friendly play structure
with rubber mats securely fastened to the bottom,
and he longed to return there,
to laugh with his friends
and eat Goldfish from tiny paper cups.
He felt certain he could go
if he could just figure out a way
to ask nicely enough--
but the teacher always said,
“No. You can't ever go back.”

Day Twenty-Nine: Flying

GOODBYE FROM TEN THOUSAND FEET

I'm flying high,

but you remain on the ground,

getting progressively smaller.

You dance in circles,

and wave your shirt wildly

so I can see you,

but I settle back in my seat,

hit the recline button,

and wait for the attendant

to bring me a chilled beverage.

It won't be long until you're

two thousand miles away,

where you belong.

Day Twenty-Eight: My Greatest Fear

PAUPER

My greatest fear is that I'll outlive

my ability to earn an income,

and will want to die faster, simply

because living is too expensive.

Millions of people are already old,

but they have an established system,

whether it's SSI or a juicy 401K,

and I was always too lazy to fill out forms.

It's sheer luck that I'm alive now,

or perhaps it's because I'm always

demanding to speak to the supervisor.

Life will become more difficult, and

my survival skills are as insufficient

as paper plates in a rainstorm,

while the clouds of impending age gather.

I suppose it's handy

that I've always had a skill for

talking myself out of trouble,

but it's impossible to say how long that will last.

In the meantime, each morning

I'm a little bit older,

and as I climb out of bed again, I realize

that it's not death I fear, it's aging.

Day Twenty-Seven: Short Dresses

YES, IT SELLS


“Why don't you show off
your body more?” my boyfriends asked me
when I was young, and wore
baggy hippie dresses that fell past my knees
with heavy, high-necked sweaters.
A roommate said,
“You should apply at Playboy.
All you have to do is wear a bathing suit
with bunny ears and a tail,
and you'd make a thousand bucks a week,
those girls are all rich.”
I didn't make enough money
for my hundred dollar rent, and struggled
at terrible retail jobs and fourth rate restaurants
rather than show my breasts and legs
to drunken businessmen looking to cop a feel.
If I had it to do all over again,
I think I'd let them--
in fact, I'd sit directly in their laps,
and say,
“That will be two hundred dollars.
Cash or check?”

Day Twenty-Six: Digging in the Dirt

SPECIAL DELIVERY

As a child, I was not allowed
to dig in the dirt of our back yard
and so I took to the streets with Ricky and Joey,
the two boys who lived down the block from me.
All three of us possessed a passion for excavation.
Through parental suppression
this had mutated into a sordid desire
to discover what lay beneath the sewer lids
in the alleyway sidewalks
next to the brick apartment buildings
that stiffly lined Roscoe Street
like huge,dirty cereal boxes.
We pried the metal lids open
with butter knives, and watched the sewage
rush underneath us like a thick brown river.
On top of the sewage were glossy fat bugs
that seemed vaguely cockroach-like,
only larger,
and we scooped these up in plastic cups--
freeing them temporarily
from the bondage of the sewer,
reveling in our roles as insect liberators--
at least until Joey stomped on them.
Strange liquid squirted from the heads
of the demolished beetles,
and Joey's favorite trick was to carefully
scoop up the bodies, place them in envelopes
and insert the envelopes into the mailbox
of a particularly vile old woman who lived
in the bottom floor apartment of their building.
She had dirty shades
drawn permanently across her windows,
and we assumed she couldn't see us,
but one afternoon, she stuck her head out of her door
and threatened to tell our parents.
We were terrified for days,
but she never snitched on us,
probably because
this would have required her to actually
leave her apartment.
I eventually moved out of the neighborhood,
and I wonder sometimes what happened to Joey
whether he ever found an outlet for his anger--
or if he's still squashing things
and then running away furtively
while looking over his shoulder,
making sure that no one is following him.

Day Twenty-Five: Stress

For today's topic, I decided to write a poem using the cut up system popularized by William Burroughs. I cut words and phrases from magazines, paying special attention to ones that hinted at stress. It was a funny medium because news tends to be stressful, and yet the act of cutting words from paper was so relaxing.

For those of you who can't make out the lettering, here's the poem:

Face it.
Nasty girls killing American style on the fiery truth,
voracious award in the unrestricted power of the afraid.
Bites of the stiff private island
dancing on a somewhat tarnished scarecrow.
Just one more lie.
All out attack coming to the
Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress.
Warning, this is salvation.
Sorry.

Day Twenty-Four: Leaving Home

 COMING OF AGE

When I was seventeen I started to count the days

until I could move out of the house.

I planned to leave on the exact day

I turned eighteen, no matter that it was the Midwest

in January, and a record cold snap blizzard

had been raging for nearly a week.

The cold just made my parents crazier,

trapped as we were in a drafty farmhouse

a mile and a half outside of Greenview, Illinois-

a town so small that it had one school

that ran from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Three days before my birthday,

I walked onto a snowy rural highway and stuck out my thumb,

was picked up by a couple of local drunks

and rode in the back of their long-bed pickup

to the nearby town of Petersburg, where my only friend Rod

lived in a huge Victorian house that he had mysteriously

bought, even though he was only twenty.

Rod wasn't there, so I opened a window

and climbed in, made myself at home for three days

amidst the dusty antiques and photos

of Rod's long-dead relatives, and waited anxiously

for Rod to arrive. When he did, he was stunned

and nervous, because he had just come home

to check his mail, then he had to go back

to his parents' house in Peoria, where he would soon go to court

for writing bad checks.

Rod owned a failed laundromat in town and had a lot of debt,

but he was the only person in town I could talk to.

Suddenly, this was no longer true,

and Rod dragged me with him to Peoria

and onto the doorstep of his parents' house.

His fundamentalist parents were already upset

about the bad checks, and I met with a chilly reception.

After asking to see my ID to prove it was

my 18th birthday, they told Rod I would have to go,

they would drive me to the Peoria rescue mission, and drop me off there.

Rod asked if he could please do something with me

for my birthday, but only for a little while.

He promised his parents that we would return shortly.

We went to Farrell's for birthday cake,

and I sat with Rod at the dingy Formica table,

feeling terrified and depressed, as the bubbling waitress

skipped over with my cake slice, eighteen candles blazing,

and said, “Well! Leah's eighteen! And she's here

with her only friend in the world, celebrating her birthday

here at Farrell's. “ She set the cake down triumphantly

in front of me, stood to the side and smirked

as I blew out the candles, and of course it took me

more than one try, because it always did.

There was no reason yet to believe

that life was ever going to be different from this.