And To Think, I Used to Write Poems Daily!

Well, back in high school during my freshman year. I wrote poems every day I was in algebra. Something about that subject just made the poems come out all the more. Then my poetic well-spring dried up just as quickly as it arrived. But Ro's post via Regina made me feel a little poemsy, so here goes. It's not the best.

I am from Hormel Spam, discontinued bags of Nalley's Cheez Pleezers, and cans of zesty Fresca.

I am from Casa Incantata, the midnight pearl swirling in the madness of King George. On good days I am from Genki Maison like a pearl in the shell.

I am from the snap dragon via a dried lavender bud, speckled with spots of mildew I can never clean out of the shower. Like that creepy evil vine in the yard wrapping itself around the rose bush that smells like raspberries, I will encroach where I am not wanted but seem to need to be.

I am from abandonment and cut-off, the silent treatment, the guilt-trip from Luella Mae station, cankles upon thunder thighs while Lydia gazes from the wall with a Mona Lisa smile, her eyes stare ahead like she could cry because she rests almost forgotten at Lake Pleasant; Fredda's chin dimple and taste for finer things to make up for what she didn't have in a husband or son; oh, how I am so glad never to have known the sharp blows of grandpa Schmitt's temper for I would have been the kind to strike back like the trollop he feared his daughter was!

I am from the line of conservative millionaires who like to live like hermits and pretend they have less money than a street beggar carrying a sign, and would rather let the taxpayer take care of their family responsibility all the while bemoaning how awful it is that there is welfare.

From the moment mother said she deliberately wanted to get pregnant to have you until the time she accused you of the fact that she would lose her job and house because of you being sick, you just knew you had come into the right family, where you definitely belonged. It was like sidling up to the bar at Cheers.

I am from an ancient reverie of noticing the smells of Mother Nature seasoned with mysitc Gnostics mysteries clapping to one hand of befuddled Zen koans.

I'm from a place in Sweden and old Teutonic lands, just outside the great volcanoes of the Cascades; I know that you will never find lion turds in the zoo, and spicy cookies are really pepparkakor.

From the time your sister got her ass stung by a bee at a rest stop to the time your father came home drunk New Year's Eve, stripped naked and hid between the coffee table and couch, meowing incessantly, just before you had your first hospitalization in which you didn't let the surprise visit by the nun scare you, something inside of you knew your life someday would make a great memoire, if not blog.

I am from shrine of your older brother's bedroom that your mother made of it when he went off to West Point, and how she quickly filled your own old room with piles of her excess crap like you never lived there, stuffed away like all of her other things crammed in her cedar chest where she can pretend you never existed until she lifts the lid on that Pandora's Box and finds out the treasure she's missed.