I hate Saturdays. The kids fight all morning over the Nintendo until I shove them out of the apartment. By the time I clean and grocery shop, I have five minutes to myself before my husband comes home from from work, grabs the remote and parks it on the couch.

So I’m pmsing, wanting to take a shower when the buzzer rings and I’m like, “Dave! Can you get the door?!” There is no sign of movement from the living room. The buzzer rings again, this time like it’s right in my ear. The sound of the tv is so loud it clashes with the buzzer. So I yell again, “Dave!” And he’s like, “What?!” “The door!” I yell.

The buzzer rings again, and I’m ready to smash whoever keeps pushing the button into little pieces! “Matt” my husband calls for our oldest son, like we’re all his fucking slaves. “The boys are down the street!” I yell. “Get off the damn couch and get the damn door!”

The buzzer rings a fourth time. My husband is still on the couch. He’s holding the remote, switching channels when I plow into the living room and yank the plug from the socket. “What the hell did you do that for?!” I don’t answer. I only know it’s either him, me or the tv. The boys need their mother and if I threw my husband out I’d have to throw the whole couch out with him. So I turn to open the window that looks down from our two-story apartment. My husband watches, thinking I’m getting fresh air.

Then I walk back over to the tv. The asshole finally sits up when the set is in my arms. “What the hell are you doing?!” he says, not believing I’ll really go through with it. My arms are shaking. My heart is pounding. I am filled with super human powers. “I swear if you” my husband tries to threaten. But I’m already carrying the set over to the window, way past giving a damn.

“You’re out of control! You’re crazy!” he cries. “Fuck you!” I say, shoving the tv off the ledge.

I feel enormous satisfaction hearing the shattering of glass and seeing the shocked and somewhat frightened look on my husband’s face.

Later though, I am alarmed by my violent behavior and my husband suggests I see a doctor. I do and he gives me a prescription to help with my mood swings. It’s strange. I don’t feel so out of control anymore, but I don’t necessarily feel better either. It’s like the real me jumped out the window with the tv. It’s like I could witness a train wreck and think, “Hmm. What should I make for dinner?” two minutes later. I mean, why is feeling nothing more acceptable than feeling the truth strongly?

Incidentally, when I opened the front door, a frightened girl scout was standing in the hallway with four boxes of chocolate peanut butter melts. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Is this a bad time?” “Oh no,” I tell her, smiling at my luck. “These are just what I needed.

When will man stop trying to own woman?

Forget your father and come with me
and create this traveling curiousity-
Sticky musk metamorphosis,
Bossa nova hips,
Put your lips to the chalice
spilling over with juices.
I need living water.
Daughters of Zion rising existence,
Dead Sea Scrolls.
Comb energy in my hair,
Tickle your breath up my spinal fluid
Vibrate my Goddess spot primal call.
Growing thrusts pulsing, pulsing thrusts motion.
Flamenco music rise
like the phoenix between my thighs.
We dream it.

Resonance flying believers.
Sushumna wave.
Dakini eyes.
Gospel revelations.
Sappho island.
Murasaki Imperial.
Cypress waterfalls.
Whisper to me the stories
of the Heian court of Japan
where sex was once sacred.
Touch me underneath.
Follow me into the dark.
Lick this wide Hecates Cave.
Wet dripping cunt.
King David cock.
Slide your jade stalk
down this deep pleasure valley.
Singing the heart open,
Singing all of her seasons awake,
Singing the world back into balance.
Let the rain have her way with us,
dripping wings,
as we weave ecstatic touch
our earth carnival.

Don’t ever listen to anyone
who tries to tell you your poem is not a real poem—
that it might be better off kept inside a journal
or rewritten as an essay.
‘Cause maybe what you have to say
is bigger than what will ever fit
into their pretty little prepackaged idea of what a poem is.
Maybe your poem doesn’t want to curl its hair
and shave its legs and put on deodorant
so it will smell more poem-like to stuffy professor types
who only live in third person.
Maybe your poem wants to be a nun belly dancer
who turns into a stream of purple
that spills out over the stars
and eats black holes for breakfast.
Maybe your poem is the wild card kind
that likes to leap from one blue yonder to another—
that would die of boredom
if it had to spend its whole life in philosophical quandary
or romantic blithering
or on a political mission with no sense of humor
or dilly-dallying allowed.
So don’t listen to cynical pseudo anarchists
who tell you what you have to say has been said before—
reducing your poems to common rhetoric,
your thoughts and feelings to assembly line parts,
the same for everyone.
‘Cause words change colors,
carry the DNA of each one’s experience.
And maybe it’s not so much the words,
but the alchemy of your speaking them out loud
right here and now that is the real poem.
Maybe it’s the way you say suckle or witch or breath
that lights a candle in the back row.
So don’t listen to needling know-it-alls who only throw shadows—
to the liar behind the lover
who says you think too much
or the friend who says you’re not thinking clearly
or the mother who only wants you to be happy…
‘Cause if you listen long enough,
those words will cut your hands off,
and teach you how to hold pens in between your teeth.
‘Cause if you let them dare you out on limbs
you couldn’t have braved alone,
those words will turn on you,
take over your life,
make you face the thing you fear the most—
that you just may be
a writer.

I work in a corporation
in a cubicle among a sea of cubicles,
like a barnacle I sit in the same spot everyday
among the other barnacles who are my friends.
We drink coffee to keep from falling asleep,
to keep from being hypnotized, lobotomized
by the white noise that dro-o-o-o-o-nes in our ears
all day long like thi-i-i-i-i-is.
Sometimes I try to harmonize with it,
but I always get pulled back to the mother tone.
I go to bed and dream in white noise. I can’t shut it off.
It’s like having a bunch of techno monks chanting in my head.
“Hummmm drummmm commmmme be like us,”
the tone says as it lulls unsuspecting souls to be sacrificed to Moloch.
Many have already left their skins.
You can see it in their gray faces
that blend in with the gray carpeting and walls.
They make offerings to the vending machine gods,
feeding the parasites that have taken over their bodies,
that keep the skin alive.
I breathe in the gray recirculated air
that’s mixed with engine exhaust from the loading dock on the floor beneath me.
I breathe and become one with the fumes
which makes my boss happy
as I tend to have a more corporately positive attitude
when I’m high on carbon monoxide.
I go to the bathroom to look in the mirror to see if I’m dead yet,
but I’m not, so I go back to work.
Baaaaaaah… Baaaaaaah.
A herd of smokers shuffles into the nicotine chamber
to marinate their lungs in Marlboro sauce.
They close the oven door and bake and shake from the morning withdrawal.
The smoke crawls out along the floor
and splits into hundreds of second hand snakes
that suck up the remaining oxygen and set my sinus cavities on fire!
On the way to the cafeteria, I pass the gray suits in the gray hallway.
They nod hello, but then their eyes return back to my tits.
They’re just little balding baby boys who weren’t breast fed long enough
and I’m still an ornament, a prostitute
in the suit world for benefits and a 401K.
Behind them I see myself twenty years from now,
dyed blonde with dark roots that didn’t have time to get to the beauty shop,
stuffed into a pair of control tops,
the top button of my skirt undone
because I don’t want to buy anything new
until I lose ten more pounds.
My pace hurried, my face buried underneath
mounds of rejuvenating make-up,
my life held together by a fake string of pearls
that just broke and lay spilled out all over the floor.
I get down on my hands and knees to help her
even though she says I don’t have to.
She doesn’t know it was the best part of my day.
She just gets up and walks anonymously away.

Every woman keeps a secret broom in her closet.
Not the broom she sweeps the kitchen floor with,
the one handed to her by her husband
to keep her from thinking too much.
But the broom made by the first mother,
passed down to the first daughter,
who rode off into the night against her father’s wishes
and became the moon.
The broom that delivered Lilith from the Garden of Eden
when there wasn’t room for more than one god,
that has been a symbol of woman’s power and will,
her ability to fly in between the worlds
as messenger, midwife, mystic, priestess,
manifesting thought into physical form.

Every woman keeps a secret broom in her closet.
Not the one she pulls out when company is coming over,
the one that makes her look good in front of the in-laws.
But the broom that shakes her
from the shackles of her pretending,
that whispers “Now!” when the moon is full,
that calls her deeper into the forest,
that still smells like trees in Avalon.
The broom once held sacred,
long since kept out of sight…
like the signs of menstrual blood,
the questions we were told never to ask,
the places on our bodies
we were punished for touching too much,
the screams we swallowed as little girls
when our mothers warned us, “That’s enough.”

I remember before being able to speak,
desperate to get my mother’s attention,
peeing my bed, burning with 105 degree temperatures,
crying, “This is your pain too! “
“Come hold me and we will heal together.”
Instead she drove us from one doctor to another,
trying to outrun, numb truth with stronger antibiotics,
hoping she could save me
from the dis-ease of being born a woman
by removing the tonsils.
Not unlike the circumcism of young girls in Asia and Africa,
whose clitorises are considered to be
as dangerous as a woman’s voice.

I remember my mother feeding me ice cream,
coating the wound with milk
until it fell asleep inside of me,
sticking a pad in my underwear years later
when it started to bleed again,
diminishing those first drops of reclaimed wisdom
to a stain on the back of my dress.

I remember throwing the soiled garments into the garbage,
wanting to bury myself along with them,
wanting to push the blood back up inside of me.
Frightened of its loud, red color,
singing of young girls running in fields smelling flowers,
of greedy gods, lost children and weeping mothers,
of eating one too many pomegranate seeds
to ever be innocent again…

Every woman keeps a secret broom in her closet.
Not the one that’s been domesticated,
that discreetly sweeps things under the rug.
But the broom that knocks at the door of her soul
every time she smiles to avoid feeling what she knows.
The broom that throws the dirt up in our faces
until we choke on the dust of our unliving,
that remembers the temples we used to dance in,
the stars and galaxies we used to spin
from our joy.

Don’t ever feel ashamed for being dumped.
For being the one who held on longest to that human dream of true love.
All this time you thought your insecurity, your emotional turbulence
meant there was something wrong with you,
that if you could just love yourself more
you could rise above the doubt creeping in.
But the truth is your brave heart simply couldn’t stop opening,
couldn’t stop surrendering.
Only the depth of your surrender, of your offering
was more than what he or she could offer in return.
The truth is your temporary low self esteem
was your wise emotional body communicating with you
that there was no longer a mutual flow of energy,
that your life force was being sucked into a vacuum.
And so you feel depleted, weary,
dipping into the lower vibrations of your being.
But it isn’t because you are confused.
No. You are actually very clear and aligned with your soul.
It isn’t that your heart, your feelings have started lying to you.
You’ve simply continued to open and are pressing up against the edge
of another’s willingness to open with you.
You are not asking for too much.
You are sending out an invitation so beautiful all of life is holding its breath.
So don’t settle for things between the two of you staying the same,
or worse, moving further away from your true heart’s desires,
telling yourself you’re being adventurous, experimental
by agreeing to have an open relationship.
The truth is we are moving into more expansive realms of relating, of loving,
but must we go about our evolution in such a brutal way-
pouring gasoline on our hearts to burn our illusions of separation?
Isn’t this humanity again trying to use our will to speed up the process?
Why are we so quick to accept concepts over our own body’s knowing?
Choosing to run like everyone else rather than move at our own body’s rhythm.
If you are not breathing deeply in life, in love
then your are moving too fast.
If you can’t feel your rib cage expanding on each inhale,
then there isn’t enough room in your body, in your relationship for your great big heart.
You have told yourself a lie along the way,
thinking that to be in relationship with someone so firey or free-spirited
you would have to be patient-you would have to compromise.
And it doesn’t matter how old you are.
Whether you are 22, 42 or 72 your heart wants passion. Your heart wants magic.
Your heart wants to see the ravishing beauty of its awesome love in physical form.
And when you create this love of your life, and only when,
you will know him or her with your whole being
because he or she has been within you all along.
And you won’t have to compromise or be afraid to surrender or make promises for life.
There simply will be no choice-because the two of you are one.
So don’t try to find him or here in a noisy bar,
but rather stay close to that powerful quiet inside of you
and you will know the substitutions who come to distract you,
who come to help you get clearer
as easily as your skin can tell 100% cotton from polyester.

And if you are unsure, when it is offered, say yes to love.
Say yes like there’s nothing wrong with you.
Say yes until you know what you want and what you don’t want.
Say yes until your whole being screams a resounding “No!”-
until your addiction to anything less falls off like overripe fruit.
Because that’s when you begin to live in love every moment-
that’s when all you create is love.
And if New Age philosophy
tells you that love between two people is an illusion,
give up on philosophy,
but don’t give up on love.

First of all you tell her to her face, so she can see yours.
Unlike the coward who yells anonymously,
“Nice tits!” out the car window
or the drunken pumped up pinhead
who makes “Hey baby!” gestures to her across the bar.
You tell her like a man who knows how to use his tongue to please a woman,
rather than a bully boy whose big bad words
reflect his three second threshold.
Live a lover who loves a woman’s mystery
more than his own need to get off.
Stirring the pools rather than stoking the volcanoes.
Taking your time to tell her,
drinking her in before speaking a word.
Approaching her as you would a tiger-striped moon fairy.
Taking care not to startle her,
making her think you are a thief,
but as a passing troubadour who comes with daisies!
This is the way you tell her—
with majesty and reverence for the exotic animal creature that she is.
From the bottom of your beautiful male cock
as well as from your heart.
‘Cause contrary to what you’ve been told, she wants both,
and longs for the centaur cast out by political correctness.
This is the way you tell her—
with humor and without armor,
if you really want her to hear you,
if you want to impress her
the way her cleavage presses up against
the buttons on her sweater.
‘Cause anything less will only bore her, annoy her,
like the flies she swats with her hand,
like the lines she’s heard a hundred times before—
when what she wants is something raw and real,
as tequila, salt and lemon juice on her lips—
when what she wants is a man who is brave enough
to meet her in that breathless space between the words—
who can look into her eyes long enough
for the two of you to swim out past the waves
to float on the night sea of possibilities
with only the black above and black beneath you—
in that soft, still erotic silence
where each one feels the most frightened, alone and in our skin.
This is the way you tell her—
like the first man on earth,
like a god-man-child who doesn’t know any better would!
And if you do it right, that woman will fall in love,
if only for a moment, with the fool in you,
and you will walk away all the richer just for having dared it.
‘Cause years later, you’ll have one more story to tell
and one less thing you wished you would’ve done.
And years later, when that woman is feeling old and unglamorous,
she will wake up laughing,
remembering the day that sweet, funny man told her
what lovely breasts she had.

Every winter I plan my suicide.
I first do something really fucked up to make me hate myself.
Then I begin my annual hibernation diet of Fritos and Cheez Wiz
so I can be smelly, fat and oily and hate myself even more.
I call my friends Robert up ‘cause he’s the only one I know
who’s always more fucked up than me.
He’s happy to hear from me.
We wallow together through the pawn shops,
discussing all the morbid possibilities.
Robert checks out the daggers.
I go right for the revolvers.
The guy behind the desk get turned on,
which makes me feel temporarily powerful and in control of my life again.
”How much?” I ask.
He gives me a price.
“You can’t commit suicide with that!” Robert slurs.
“It’s so fucking phallic!”
The guy pulls out another.
I put it to my head and ask my friend what he thinks.
“Better,” he says. “We need more beer.”
We leave the pawn shop.
I’ve never actually left with a gun.
I once remember an old boyfriend jokingly holding a loaded gun to my head though.
“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “My dad never leaves any bullets in it.”
But when I go to push his arm away the thing goes off,
shooting a bullet right through the curtains and the wall of the house.
I remember the two of us just sitting there on the bed laughing hysterically,
driving in silence to buy new drapes
and plaster to cover the hole in his parent’s bedroom.
Other than that little episode, I mostly just imagine shooting myself in the head,
lying in a pool of blood, my cerebral steak hanging out of my caved in skull.
I say to myself, “I could go to the bank on my lunch hour,
pick up a gun on my way home from work and be dead by dinner.
Blowing my brains out is my preferential choice of suicide
because it’s both violent and precise, like hate.
And as long as I hate myself I stay in control.
With razor blades and pills, you never know.
But with a gun you can be sure it’s pretty much a done deal.
I also like the idea of blowing my brains out
because it’s my mind that gives me the most trouble.
It says, “Get a job!” one minute
and “You’re selling your soul doing this shit!” the next.
It whispers, “Take off your clothes and throw them out the window!”
only to yell “Fool!” as I sit butt naked at the light.
Maybe that’s why we all love getting inebriated.
Maybe we’re trying to kill our brain cells on purpose
so we won’t be able to think so fucking much.
Maybe it’s part of the heart’s bigger plan to take over the head.
Maybe I’m not so depressed and confused after all.
I just need to stop taking my serious thoughts so seriously.