Bad, and Not Very Good

Today, I got my first issue
of the New Yorker
with poems that
slip and shimmy and dance
like legs in Radio City

and here I am, at
a strip club, with my
stretch marks and my
thigh high boots, kicking
you in the nuts.

Slight of Hand

Children become Poets very simply 

with a little rhyme or a little dance,

they tap their toes and wiggle their nose

and there is a poem, at least, at a glance;

Teenagers! don't have it so easy,

they chortle and scoff and hid their sheets,

they grow and show and throw and blow

but the little children stay fast asleep; 

Grown-ups are even worse, you see

they take themselves so seriously,

and wain and wax poetic-al-ly 

where form triumphs their feelings, 

But, if you wait, and if you want

and if you ponder long enough,

then you will find the long lost stuff

hidden behind the ceiling,

can't you see that certainty

does not make good poetry,

it's in the dance and in the sea

that we will find it, wading, free~

waiting up for us to see that 

teenage light, that night light

in the corner, that light that keeps

away ghosts, that infant light

hidden in the page. 

Woolf and The Bath

I have just left 

my daughter and

her mother to play

in the bath 

and I drip! 

I slipped 

away to

write you this note

while no one 

was looking, I 

looked to my 

left / right 

and remembered

that Virginia had

a father that probably

scurried around the corner

to have a pint or a smoke 

or write a little something

tucked away in this book,

tucked away for you;

he never imagined that

her toys would turn

to stones and that 

his words wouldn't work.