Thursday, January 8, 2015

Non-manic cleaning spree - Comet shines tonight - Poem: Mother Would Have Liked You

The one thing I never did do when I'd get manic, was to clean.

Today's goal:  Clean the middle room.
This here pen is now in the trash.

Got it at the Hotel Joyce in Paris a couple of years ago.

Au revoir! It's on the Persian rug I bought from an Iranian merchant who left Iran.

 Don't wanna make holes in the wall of The Quiet Room, so I lean things against the wall. The lamp is from the late Elinor Schuler before she and George moved to Ann's Choice. Bought the prints at Willow Grove Bible Church by Sylvia Castellanos.
Meditation couch.
I gave the room a good Bisselling.




Made three trips into the freezing cold dark night b/c Tonite is Garbage Night.

Found the poem about "Evelyn" I was looking for.

Started The Good Earth in the kitchen. It skipped so badly I can't listen to it. It's GREAT! So I went online and ordered another copy from my library.

It is so beautiful outside now. Stars are very far away.

Oh! Just remembered that Bendesky, I believe, wrote on FB about a comet.

Orion and Comet LoveJoy, Jan. 5, 2015

The comet is shining above a devastated Paris where three Muslims shot 12 people "in a slaughter at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo." One, a teenager, gave himself up at a police station northeast of Paris.

Speaking of outrageous, horrific events, Scott and I watched a Frontline presentation Secrets of the Vatican. You would not believe what goes on there. Not all the priests and bishops, certainly, but it's a culture of self-promotion, greed for money and power, alliances with mobsters, drug usage, money-laundering from their unsupervised bank, and a ready-made culture for pedophila. .


This man and his appointees aim to make things right.

"If he lives long enough," said someone.

Over the years I've written numerous poems about my psychotherapy clients. For perhaps seven years I saw "Evelyn."

Where had she gotten to? She couldn't stand The Lamb Foundation. Her cousin Angie, who I wrote and asked to contact me, never did, so I thought, Hmmm, perhaps Bruce Brownell is still in touch with her.

Glory be! he is. And goes to visit her frequently. She is living with her therapist Rosie, Rosie's husband and their dog. Evelyn loves dogs!

Rosie has a lot of rules for Evelyn, said Bruce. I got his phone number from my library.

I used to drive her to this same Christian counselor, who, I must say, has proven herself a true Christian.



MOTHER WOULD HAVE LIKED YOU

Boston Market, crucible of the western world
stands as a watchtower on Welsh and York
as Evelyn and I enter the air-conditioned splendor
with joy and a sigh
A long line of hungry people snake around
the glass windows
she leans like a hungry pup
fat rump on the glass
her dachshund breasts pedaling under her shirt

Every manner of person has come to dine
in sodium splendor, our fingers twitching with
eagerness to tear apart a hen who had no home
only a cage and a duty to give her life for mankind
gladly,

Unlike me,
a hen with a home,
my one hundred eggs
done with their duty
smoldering useless until death
do us part

Boston Market, established 1985,
the year after my nervous breakdown,
where I failed in my half-hearted attempt
to slay my mom,
what’s a daughter to do but apologize
and take her shopping on Saturdays
the cart she pushes as a cane
her tiny feet tramp tramping
in tooth-bright sneakers
maintaining her dignity
maintaining her stance
as we round the bend
in search for the perfect peach.

She will never know that
an artist famous in our town
presented me with an oil painting
of peaches, each one soft and biteable
as a woman’s breast
but in a manic moment
I thought it ugly and
threw it in the trash.

I was like that once.

Here at our table at
Boston Market
Evelyn pours gravy across her chicken breasts
tells me, not for the first time,
“Mother would have liked you, had
she lived” – it is my job to keep Evelyn
alive and do, her mom downed too many
gin and tonics while Evelyn was swimming
inside, an aquarium of booze
and came out all wrong, except for
beautiful black hair
she refuses to wash.

A tiny sneakered black child
enters with his parents
a proud American flag
stitched across his shirt.

How can they still
love America, I wonder,
after what we’ve done to them
after what we still do.

Don’t ask me to watch Mockingbird again
we swung them from trees
as if they were dolls not men
their acts of forgiveness are boundless
boundless as their love for chicken and for Jesus
You’d love Jesus too I’m imagine
if you ankles were shackled and bled

like Jesus.

Their African songs carried them
in the ark across the sea
akin to the Israeli soldiers
who singing, sling their dead in
upraised arms like that of a
man his bride
blood drops on the desert floor

I scan across York Road where a funeral
is in progress on the opposite corner
I am reminded of the funeral
of my drunkard father-in-law
whose mind back in Hot Springs died
before he did

Next morning, like Jesus, I arise
standing before the kitchen sink
on tiptoe looking out at my green backyard

I can only think of heaven as
seeing that first shaft of morning light
splashing against the backyard maple.
 

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