Bleeders, Repeaters...

I always dread Mother’s Day. No matter how many years pass, I wave away the wishes, as though I’ve been faking motherhood. I’ll always be a daughter first.

I keep thinking about my mother-- -the memory thing... like she hasn’t quite regressed but is in this sort of impossible labyrinth of multiple-ending thought process. No way out.

I keep testing my own brain--- going over things.

She counts the photographs in the bedroom. When I call her—she goes in there, and counts the photos like hours, like days... like some kind of time-banister she can hold as she walks steps. A kind of litany.

She doesn’t use words like brocade, ineluctable. Maybe she never did. I made assumptions. One of my flaws, she would have said. She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t want to call attention to her lapses. A kind of pride of madness—a demure madness.
Liz Taylor.. she said, the other day.. .then nothing.

I should have taken more pictures... I was always worried about wasting film. I always hated those deals you’d get from the schools--- with 16 wallet-size photos and 5 or 6 4x 5’s, and 2 8 x 10s... all identical, so your child looked ‘packaged’ and cheap.

Liz Taylor had congestive heart failure. A broken heart. Trouble of love. Purple eyes signify bleeders. They fail at things because people expect too much. Expectations of love are not love. Then again, people who exceed our expectations make us uncomfortable.

I bought some furniture on Craigslist. I was too embarassed to reject anything. I felt sorry for every single person whose apartment I entered. Apologetic...You are buying things, not people, my friend reminds me. I am the one who cries on busses...who reads the Straphangar’s Poetry with the obscene grafitti on it and then tears up... .

I miss my husband, I think. Which one, my friend asks.
Both of them. I don’t know. Life is so complicated. My portrait will have three faces. Pathetic.

What do you do to mourn? Make a flute from someone’s bone? Weave a shirt from their hair, wear teeth around your neck? You need something of theirs... you need this...But we are all something which will blow in the wind...

I had this dream... my mother was outside in some kind of windstorm, planting dead flowers.
I’ll tell you about miracles, I said to the window...
It’s all about breathing...
all in the breath...
I woke up thinking about
the way the e changes everything.

I should have taken more pictures... I shouldn’t have worried about wasting the film...
My dead baby...she is missing.
The boy on the bus--
When I was in my 20’s, a high-school senior-- -he followed me –every day, for weeks and weeks...he rode the bus and stared at me with unbearable passion. He had
a curved penis...
My dead baby... I loaned him money to get an abortion for some girl...his dead baby...the way he looked at me on the bus... every afternoon, until I couldn’t bear his longing. This kind of thing will never ever ever happen again.

I repeat the name Kemba Walker---like a mantra... he was in my son’s bunk at camp.
He had the name – a winning name...his mother is proud.

My mother has a sad name. A nostalgic, old-fashioned name. Breathe, I think. Breathe until I can tell her I love her, which I can’t do. It’s complicated.
Her caretaker, she tells me...is not her ‘type’. Neither am I.

Here you go, spill your vein onto this paper.