Roses, Kindly, Petals.

The roses kindly force petals on moving ghosts.
We move with ghosts and we are of ghosts.
Words are spoken and move with hosts.
We vanish and the last one remains what was left insane,
And no one speaks, and nothing speaks.
Today we speak and are of tears,
And love lasts these most tender years,
Everyone thought what we would become,
Just like a night in a forbidden tomb.
You said I was a demon; you said I was the devil,
I don’t know what is more afraid than being level.
The rose was in a thorn of roses and nothing more
Than I supposes,
Than all the riches of the earth,
And those who live and die in birth,
Are forced like memories of our worth.
You taught what you were taught in midnight thought.
Everyone told us what we were told.
The last night disappears in tarnished gold.
For all our worth is never sold.
The roses kindly force petals and fade-
The light is gone and night abade.

Befriended.

The woman knocks on my door every Saturday morning,
hoping to revive my faith in a God I no longer believe in.

She is not Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist. She is Catholic,
she says, one of the few left surviving in the world.

Every Saturday morning, I disappear down the street,
and sit and people watch at the coffee shop on Mood Street,
trying to find a way to network.

Most people I know are doormats, losers, sinners, thieves,
living in a world that is not right for them.

I know, twenty years from now, she, as a forty-three year
old woman,

will still be knocking on my door, her face pressed against
the doorknob, desperately trying to dredge up a reason

for coming here, for her existence, for something that is
bigger than herself. I refuse to befriend her.

Resiliant.

My grandmother sat in her rocking chair
Spouting songs of war-Vietnam, World War I,
The war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She said she’s seen them all.
My husband bought a new car, parked it in the driveway
Of our new house. I stood proudly, admiring
His efforts-the love of my life, my secret admirer.

I met him at a barbecue seven years ago,
At my father’s house-he brought the ketchup and
Mustard, and charmed my neighbor.

She was sixty
Years old and later that year, moved to a nursing home
that was run
By the government-the rooms cost three hundred
Dollars each.

Poems fell out of open mouths like ashes.
My husband said he would give me the stars if it
Made me happy.