In My Room the Women Come and Go

If only they would limit their discussions to art.


Instead, they lament, voices plaintive and thick, slurred with alcohol and death.

Go away, mournful ghosts. I do not want to know the weight of your sad hearts, the texture of your scars.


Why pour your misery into me with such intimate whispering? You have no secrets. You splashed everything out in bright blood blossoms all over your pages for everyone to read, the neglect of parents, the betrayals of husbands and lovers, the abuse and abandonment of your children. You have no secrets left. Your words and memories should be enough to carry all your guilt. Your ghosts should not even exist. And still.



Even when I sleep, your voices drill into my head, mewing complaints forcing me awake. I spend my time in your cigarette garden, whiskey watered guilt-flowers stinking up the landscape.



God, given me back the bachelor butchers: the General, the Surgeon, the bleak and sour-faced soul-reeking priest.

I'm more comfortable with demons bent on destroying me than these mad, mournful ghost-ladies clawing for pity, tearing my heart into strips, swallowing the pieces.

With All Due Respect.

And now a toast to my drunken formothers, Dorothy, Anne, and Sylvia, Virginia, Zelda and poor, sad Vivienne, "Dear Muses, thanks, but no thanks. I will decline your fame and hearbreak and die content in benign obscurity. Take your gin and genius and leave me just my sanity. Amen."

A Reminder

When there is a day or a stretch of days or a year that is so hard that all the sweetness goes out of the sky, when Music is no longer luscious, and food and fabrics and words are leeched of all their precious taste and touch and the lists of life's amazements mock rather than comfort, when someone says, "I love you" and you say, "It doesn't matter," this is as bad as it gets. It isn't a question of pills and razorblades but of walking out of your own life forever and not even stopping to say goodbye.

Walking until you just dissolve, and who knows what's become of you?

Unless someone says, "It matters to me."

It's a pin through the heart and it hurts but it keeps you there. It's a chain of names and faces far too heavy but they anchor you.

You cannot drift; you will not come to nothing.

When it is as bad as it gets, balanced on that edge and about to fall

there is nothing left that can be done, or undone or wished or said except, "I love you, that is all."