Quiet Mind.

I am the quiet mind.

I am the heart that can't breathe.
I am the broken. The dark destiny.
The friend without a friend.

In the last light of the full moon,
my mind bears the burden of you.
Bears the burden of what I am.

A human. A ghost. A liar.
Excuses drift across the ocean like flowers.
I surround myself with petty pennies.
A shadow that settles on a rock.

I keep myself steady, my hand on my belly,
mother calls to me from the other room and asks

if I need something to eat. I haven't eaten
well in weeks.
The quiet mind within a well. I don't have-anything-
trees, twigs, tears.

My eyes smart. I see visions of ghosts.
My loneliness breaks me. I am bent over rocks.
My hunger is not a problem. I am not a problem.

Darkness will not break me.
Never the quiet mind within the quiet heart.
Never the quiet.

Losing Faith.

He laughs at things that are intelligent.
He thinks the whole world owes him something.
I tell him they don't.
He insists they do-and decides to take it further
by having a baby with a dark-haired woman
with too much lip, whose intelligence is sub-par,
and whose tattoos are jaded, at best; she was
trying to impress him when they first met,
she wanted a husband, she says, not a lover.
She does not have faith in the system.

I, myself, prefer a lover, not a husband.
I prefer long walks on the
beach, talking about sweet sorrows and the
horrible killing of the whales
and the mating of the elephants
in long exhausted Africa, where the Rwandans and
Congolese people are trying to survive on little
or nothing at all.

I prefer making dinner at home to going out.
I prefer movies at the theater to a DVD player.
I prefer a lot of things. That doesn’t mean I’m
going to get it. I’m not loud, or boisterous,
or rude; that’s what men prefer nowadays.
At least that's what I read in an article in The New York Times.

I am a quiet woman in a room full of light and color
and the darkness is prominent. Nothing can be done
about this. No one says anything about anything.