Category Archives: After Midnight

Torn Love

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Since today was still another free topic, I have chosen to take the Poets and Writers weekly prompt which is: The Flip Side—This week, think of something that has happened to you recently that was stressful, traumatic, or unpleasant. Write a poem about this event as you experienced it, regardless of anyone else’s perspectives or feelings on what occurred. Then rewrite the poem from the perspective of someone else involved in the situation. This new poem may not reflect the truth, but sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves that everything has a flip side.

I

Torn Love

Still standing close,
each on our own side of this terrible rending,
how can we see things so differently?
This little flap of skin
you keep pulling open
wants to close.

This is how cancers start—
this worrying and worrying of an old injury.
My darling. Leave it alone
and let us heal.
This is only a biopsy
of our changed love affair.

If it is cut out of us,
it will be by your decision;
and no number of late-night arguments
will ever change that fact.
What you need to remember
the next morning,
you will remember.

If it were up to me,
we would still be friends,
but if you need an enemy
to console you in your actions,
I guess I must be that too.
I always was a figment
of your imagination.
Believe that
if it makes this easier for you.

II

Cicatrix

I know better than you
what lies buried under
my healed-over self.

The raised part of me
grown to protect the wound
creates this distance
that I once warned you of.

I need to thicken that part of me
where part of you remains,
and if for this time you gasp for air,
it is my thick skin growing over you,
like an orb spider winding you in my web

until you become
the one in me hidden so deep
that even you
believe you’ve disappeared.

Nighttime: Dia de los Muertos

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This week’s photo theme for WordPress was “Nighttime,” but it was too hard to pick one of the many night scenes I was considering, so instead I chose a series of shots from last year’s Dia de los Muertos in Patzcuaro.  Dancing, graveside ceremonies, refreshments and general revelry go on all night long.  Our boat broke down half way to the island and so we had an especially long night of it as men opened the bottom of the boat to try to free the fishing nets that had been securely wound around the propellers.

Autumn Schmautumn

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The Prompt: Autumn Leaves—Changing colors, dropping temperatures, pumpkin spice lattes: do these mainstays of Fall fill your heart with warmth — or with dread?

Autumn Schmautumn

The only colored leaves I see are going to be faux,
for autumn never visits in my part of Mexico.
In fact, those piles of autumn leaves are far back in my past.
Green on the leaves in Mexico just lasts and lasts and lasts.
It’s true that each leaf everywhere must one day be defeated,
but down here where I live, the only way leaves are unseated
is not by frigid temperatures. There’s no cold to unglue them.
Our only leaf-removal means is cutter ants that chew them!
The ones who cut them down are all the bravest and the best.
Their comrades wait below to carry them all to their nest.
Their robberies completed without the slightest peep,
their piles of leaves depleted in the nighttime while we sleep.
Our guard dogs doze on soundly as ants pass by in the dark,
letting all these thieveries go on without one bark.
And so I fear that this far south no autumn colors are viewed.
Our trees create no spectacle. They go from green to nude!
And though ants harvest all our leaves—just chew them off and take them,
at least they grant us favors in that we don’t have to rake them!

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