This Is Your Life

Night takes you apart.

Morning repairs you.

If making your bed

and lying in it 

is the best medicine,

darkness is your doctor.

Tonight he’s a stranger,

tomorrow, a dead friend.

With your bed a hospital,

the only remedy  

is a discharge

and a return

to light.

Mind’s an open house;

every thought a guest.

You entertain angels

and devils with the same

willingness to please,

as if accommodation

were your salvation.

Tonight could offer

answers.

In night’s amphitheater 

the spectators gather:

the grade school teacher,

Mrs. Sherman,

the mother coifed by clouds,

the father gray as birch,

the teacher clutching an apple,

the best friend thumbing

through a book.

Yet all you can manage

is to make a fort 

in your father’s arms, 

each hand a foothold,

his mouth, a hollow

without a heart

decidedly

helping you

to climb.

No recurring dream

can spare us the repetition

of ordinary days. 

But here, nothing can happen

and everything will.

If dreams break the law

then a dreamer

is lawless.

Sleep brings no rhyme 

or reason, just free verse.

Your mouth, too slack 

to form a smile

speaks in fractured verbs.

Those you lost faith in

clamor for provocative words,

blatant bids for 

intransitory attention. 

When they speak, your

listening lets them in.

Were you on a bike 

going up Amsterdam

or was that a dream?

If you don’t understand,

how will we?

All you’re sure of is

you go into labor 

at the drop of a hat,

christening a cab

with your broken water,

elevating elevators

with delivery pangs.

A park bench adds only

insult to your beautiful

injury.

Standing in the checkout

of a grocery

timing your contractions

you make a break for it.

Ducking into a bank

to find 

your deposit refused.

Finally in the lobby

you give birth to a hare

with bloodshot eyes.

Try and remember.

Abandoned as an infant 

in a closed room 

with one open window,

you’re found by 

law enforcement 

whose flashlights cast

your first fairy

on the walls 

surrounding your crib.

Is this how

fairytales begin?

Orphaned until five

you learn becoming 

desirable is your best 

chance for survival.

Chased out of

your neighborhood

by bullies afraid

of your androgyny.

you escape out of

the clutches of

the insensitive

only to land

in a fire

held safe

(or is it captive)

by an alchemist’s retort?

Your adulthood will mean

in order to transmute

you will need to

transmogrify.

You take a job as 

a sex worker

knowing eventually

all scum rises

to the top.

You wed your opposite

in a marriage

of inconvenience,

two wrongs

destined to make a right.

Your guilt leads to priesthood.

But the dreams persist.

Each morning you wake,

an amnesiac struggling

to remember 

how to love.

9/24/21