It's not because of You, and it's not for Herself.

It's just How It Is.

i should have taken one. they were sitting right there. three boxes, five each. no one would have noticed. at least not right away. and when they did, they'd assume they lost or misplaced it. if they even cared at all. scientists are always losing things.

i should have taken one. i should have. damnit. i should have taken one. DAMNIT. damnit, damnit, damnit.

He commented that my nipples looked like little forts on hilltops.

Lying there at his hand, I thought of contraptions of sandalwood ... great, elaborate, impossible. Fragrant in the Eastern heat, sitting, as crowns, on twin round summits white as ivory.

As the garrison's midday cry rang out, he pinched one playfully.

© Gloria, 2007--used with permission

She stares through the defects of the other world on her wall
how it hangs with it's left ear cocked
omniscient outspoken but inherently silent
its flat-plane face overrun with minutiae's shadow-puppets and the haze in her eyes

The edges of the room begin to pulse
begin to drum the glass-half-empty beat of the disappointment she is
the toes she's stepped on
the laces she's tripped over

And she is ugly

at last succumbing to the caress of gravity,
the sky split open--

a final winter fruit,
white-knuckled, forsaking its branch--

and wept itself out through its wounds
to drown the earth beneath.

i sat swaddled and stunned,
still as the house

through whose halls silence raged,
a marker of absence

like the sunken district of the pillow
where your head had lain.

when night fell, i rubbed my hands together
and felt the emptiness of all spaces,

while outside the sky disclosed its soul through its belly,
a relentless, wet death.

a good poem is not
sacrosanct at birth,

neither is a good poem
labored over as pie crust,
each fissure soothed and nursed
toward a final, immaculate lay.

it is much simpler---

a good poem is
a bad poem that,
with time, has been
forgiven.

i don't have to love you.  i choose to.  the way i, daily, choose not to drive into the woods and hang myself.