Expressive Domain

Value Menu

In the last crisis
when your family needed
money,
time,
empathy,
anything,
your name was at the bottom
of the To Call list.

So you could sit back
with comments like,
“Yeah, that bites,”
knowing someone else
stepped up to solve
the day’s problems.

You’re the screw-up.
People don’t expect anything
from you
knowing you
stretch yourself
just twisting your mind
around your curly fries.

Yeah, that bites.

Time Tested

I imagine
squeezing seconds
like liquid
pimple poppings
from frantic
preteen pubescent
relatives reliving
illusional instances
of overly
pressing problems
that they
can’t control,
and again
they throw
me more.

ENOUGH, ENOUGH!

Hesitant to Ask You

It is only when I am unsure
that I wonder what you think
and that use to be
all the time.

But now a calmness
has come
like Momma’s hand
pressing my bedspread
to the very corners
that my teddy bear
knew better than
to rumple.

The smooth orderliness
of my days
has begun to glide
me to the place
where my mother lives
where bowls are washed
before her cookies cool.

I finally moved my teddy bear
storing him way up on a top shelf
where my wonderings now live
most of the time.