Why bother with big girl panties when you can go commando?

I wear my ambition

I wear my ambition like a shirt

Monday's wrinkles show signs of neglect

hidden in the dark of a closet for some days when I could not

spill the stains of motherhood upon it.

I understand what it means to pull it, fresh, from the
laundry, warmed over and new-smelling; clean for me

To slip it on ---

the ends of follicles yawning upward from unused arms
the scent permeating through a nostril and tapping on a

dormant thought

The first wear is reverent and grateful,

With movements slow and deliberate
I do not mind the stiffness of its cuff.
I dare not press into its fabric with my wait.
At the end of the day I may remove it delicately
and hang it in good view, protected, ready.
I may slip on the flick of light and look at it again---
hold it mentally hostage so as to dream of it.

The next wears are less electric.
Less ceremonious.
We know each other, now.
Space between us dissipates to may way for a softer cling.
We fit and glide together as a team,
unapologetic,
toward the first spoil.
Soon we are dirty
with the sweat of inspired action.
The droplets fuse us in places.
By now it knows the crooks of me
and I the bends of it.
We sleep together,

But Friday's morning brings threat of domesticity
and jealous duties, wanting the touch of this woman's hand.
And so I finger the button hovering at my heart's front
through its hole
down past an artist's gut and lower chakras
until it drops
to hug an ankle one last time.

Flicked
into the blackest corner of a closet
where it will wait patiently
for this body to return.

Today I will choose

Today I will choose
my pick of ancestors.

of artists and poets,
warriors,
old slight men with long peppery whisps of beard - (they wave slow like algae
at each prophetic breath),

tragic girls weighted into the waters by the heft of their brilliance,
heroes and deceptives:
joan's of arc and circes who wreck a savior's course,

a silly fat man in a straw hat who writes, unabashedly, of white romantic eruptions
a Frenchwoman in lust with a playwrite, who secrets her prose...

Adam's rib, and
Even a villain.

They fill my pedigree until
my genetics pulse with a family history of the grand
and unruly
and my knowledge becomes my power,
for I am doomed, I know now,
to greatness.

Real loss

real loss is felt in the bones.

to feel it is to quiver in the heart directly.
to shiver from the center, in flutters outward
to trembling limbs weak
and untrustworthy.
when tear-valves contract, and breaths move rapid
and wild
and irregular.

it is to shudder in the spine
and gut
and places we rarely remember or feel.

to flare in the nostril, twitch in the center of the eyelid,
clench the perineum, and wag the metatarsals
all in symphonic relation...
toward a beautiful and vast absence of control

to feel instantly and completely in the body and
in the voice of the mind
and in the rapids of swishing, encaspulated blood
and in the plunging depths of
a soul that we may or may not claim,

that moment of clarity and unbounded freedom.
when you realize that


Inhale:
they were never yours


Exhale:
nothing ever is