Octopus flowers in the dark

I want to tell you

Yes, you

the man who was so briefly

in my life

that while you were in my life

that you were gifted

with an extraordinary mind

There’s strength and risk

in my mirror,

power and dexterity

in yours

I can’t

throw out

my feminine energies

with the past

nor with the pasta water

however much

I want to

I have to accept

you are no longer

in my life

that I was

so submissive to you

The river flows into me

I dream in English

of war

of Gaza

of the warts

on my hands

when I was a child

questioning everything

but my pain

remains in harmony, in synch

with my heart

the octopus

grows cold in the sea

somehow it found

its way into

the river

into my heart

I demanded it to stay

in the same way

I demanded

the man to stay

What does

a broken woman say

to the river

to the sea

to the octopus

but this

I am broken,

please fix me

Once I thought

I knew everything

I don’t

That truth

doesn’t hurt me anymore

It’s Sunday

After church the family

has returned home

My mother

cuts up an apple

She eats it in

tiny bite-sized pieces

in the kitchen

The kitchen

is her paradise

My father is lying

on the bed

across from me

as sad music

falls all around us

like green apples

The world

is a cold place

when no one

loves you

when no one

wants you or desires you

in the way

they did when

you were

in your twenties

Older now

I write

in my journal

of emptiness

of futility

of sadness

She is old now,

they will say

She is depressed

Her arms

belong to Chopin

The leaf is Freud

The leaf is Gaza

and the sea

now is adopted

by these strange hands.

Sand

The

suggestion of your face in my hands

held there

simply just held there

as the structure of the day folded itself

into me

its command centre

The silence elevates me

and it carries me through somehow

I think of us now as something deliberately

set in slow motion in the passage of time

You find yourself in another country now

surrounded by a sea of strange faces

strange bodies

strange women

(more confident than me)

that you call your friends now in your life

I must stop this

Stop writing to you in poems

This sadness in me

I write to it

Sadness in me

like a whole fruit or nut

except that nothing about this

fruit is nourishing

it’s only strange

like the strange bodies in your life

like the strange women in your life

This sadness penetrates every cell in my body

this cage

this room

My father sleeps away the day

There is nothing I can do for him anymore

My mother sings

She sings a gospel tune in the kitchen

It fills the house

and then my broken heart

filled with grief

In case you didn’t know this

I am grieving

for the day my father won’t be here

Morning trees

My eyelids flutter

At night

I become a dark forest

my arms turn into branches

my hair into a valley

Grass finds me

and the sea fading to moonlight

I play Miki Matsubara’s Stay With Me

and close my eyes

as the walls close in

on my depression

and fear.