Same Old Joe

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted in a while. I'm still not posting anything new, but I thought I should at least do something. You can scold me all you want, but I already feel guilty about not writing more. While I was reading my friend Carol Lynch Williams's blog that she does with Ann Dee Ellis, Throwing Up Words, I couldn't help but feel like the scum of the earth, or at least the thing that's STILL sticking to my left shoe, for not creating writing goals for 2010. I swear they're swimming around in my head somewhere. They usually surface while I'm in the shower (not a pretty picture), but they seem to disappear before I get to my desk at school.

I promise to have my goals for writing this year (in writing) and posted for the world to see sometime in the next week or so. Maybe I should take Carol and Ann Dee's hint and not procrastinate.

In the meantime, here's an old piece that I scraped from the inside of my drawer:

“Revelatory Reflection”

bloodshot eyes at four-thirty a.m. stare at
a heavy-set reflection staring back at the
five o’ clock shadow that looks more like seven-thirty
and growing later

I blink

and catch a glimpse of my father staring back,
clean-shaven in his dress blues, ready for the general’s briefing,
and he walks out
the door;
Old Spice and teenage resentment
linger from his morning kiss

Why do you have to go?

You’ll understand when you’re older . . .

seven
months of wondering if you were coming home,
seventeen
years of wondering if you really cared . . .

late night chastisements—
after you had fallen
in and out of sleep
in the la-z-boy while I paraded around without regard
to you,
to curfew,
to anything not me—

they still burn
but now with different ardor

Why do I have to go?

predawn sighs surface from the kids’ room
down the hall;

seven
years of ends that barely met,
seventy
months of payments and pacifiers,
seventy
thousand soiled diapers later . . .

bleary-eyed,
I wipe the steam from the mirror
as I rub the stubble of yesterday,
mold my countenance—
my future—
in my hands

Dad,
I understand now,
I whisper through the lather on my chin
and scrape and shave the foaming bitterness down
the drain

This was written around 2003 or so--you know, one of those aha moments. My dad is now one of my best friends, even though at one point in my life I made that difficult.