Ode to a Cheap Shoe

You’re a cheap shoe,
a K-Mart ingenue,
white sole, synthetic smile,
sloppy laces fated to fray,
sloppy canvas that bleeds my socks.
Always complications!

I’ve been lucky enough
to find just my size
and then the surprise of
an enjoyable fit.
A one season shoe,
no presumptuous spring
in your step,
bouncing back from
the perils of pavement.
You give in at the toe, heave ho.
And I out grow, and,
Dear John, move on…

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Now Blindness asks, What’s in a photograph?
That bending scent–your garden, ripe with dew…
Your softball scar! My gawky dyke giraffe!
Some laughter echoes, tracing down our youth.

The card’mom ghosts that clung to kitchen air…
House renovations–rainbow gingerbread…
The peachy rinse that clouded your roped hair…
Accordion folds…your grin, the sheets, our bed…

Apartments old and brittle; photographs.
So clingy to the touch…Prints left behind…
Your book unshelved, you cradle it–new calf.
Between the slips you visit wilder times

Without me. I turn off light’s waterfall–
Your skin my album…my state…sweet recall.

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

Here’s a fun ditty nudging my poetry pal Jean. She works 80 hours a week at saving the world and seems to forget that writing is a lifeboat with room for all. I volleyed this to her years ago and challenged her to answer me. Here’s a reminder, you delicious workaholic!

While Jean Doesn’t Write

While Jean doesn’t write,
seditious phrases make their escape
to parallel dimensions where
mothman aliens hunt and gather them,
eat them silently and then
look through at us knowingly.
This phenomenon is entirely
Jean’s fault.

While Jean doesn’t write,
17 wars that we know of continue
like a second day of rain,
race relations in America harden into
pre-1970’s pessimism
and 2/3 of her neighbors fail to recycle.
Indeed, for every day that
Jean doesn’t write,
another Republican actor runs
for office.

While Jean doesn’t write,
her lifelong friends don’t change.
Her adult children do what they will.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

While I was writing the screenplay My Second Simone and developing the stage play Addah Belle’s Pocketwatch, I was consumed with the fires we all go through. I remembered the irony of this old poem I wrote about my mom. I say, “She would give a breast to be needed that way again,” and about a year after I wrote it, she had her left breast removed. I implored her to stop taking me so literally…

The Captive Fire

She tosses the yarn
and the kittens roll with it,
hitting the wall at the
propane heater,
its grill a cage for
the captive fire within.

She lets out a smile
but it swings back to her,
on a pendulum,
like a good smile,
contained in quiet play.

In the span of a sigh
the kittens will leave, cats,
echoes of the children
who fell, men and women,
from her breast.
She would give a breast
to be needed
that way again.

She snatches the yarn
and the kittens
settle for her shoelace
as she finishes the fringe
on her fourth grandson’s afghan.
Muted shades of
red, orange and yellow.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

By your watch laid on my pillow
I can measure the seconds it takes to
trace your face, your collar bone, relaxing.

But I don’t want to know.

I want your hands timeless when they
steady me, pivot me, surveying,
discovering territory unexplored for so long.

I don’t want to think.

Some tick of self checking might slide
in like clothing between us when we’d already
cleared that obstacle.

Let there be no measure of this.

Let me take your weight and rhythm on me without
comparison. Scales and justice can leave me
alone with what I need this once.

Hold me from inside. Levitate me.

Measure me alive, your lip like an inchworm across
my skin, there, there, there. Map me accurately.
I’ll surrender to your seconds if you’ll stay.

I’ll surrender to you in seconds if you’ll stay.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

In honor of National Poetry Month and the start of Heathcote Earthings’ festival season, a gemstone poem! Join us today at the York, PA Fairgrounds for the Pennsylvania Herb Festival, and at Spoutwood Farm’s Fairie Festival Friday, April 30 through Sunday, May 2! Kubiando!!!

Forty Different Jaspers

Spread them out.
Tickle and tingle and touch.
Candle and wash them,
ready for ritual.

The weight of a collection.
Pencil lapis and lovers.

Forty different jaspers,
obsidians, agates–
dyed Brazilians
in seductive slices.

Gaia seducing my eyes
with mottles and swirls,
my chakras electrical sockets.

picture jasper,
desert divination.
I see the landscape of
my thirst.

My amethyst pendulum,
swaying drunk. Smokey quartz
to see through darkly
at phantoms waltzing.

I am a stage, a yoga mat.

Apache teardrops,
volcanic glass at the
bottom of a cliff to
remember a massacre.

As if looking through
darkness to see a tear
were magic.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

It’s a brute and it’s abrupt,
concrete step, cold in summer,
4 a.m. Geneva. Sterile gowns are
being unloaded beside me.
I guess they’ve learned to leave
the grieving alone on this shift.

It’s the most complete thought I’ve
had in an hour. If I don’t take the next
breath, the next moment won’t have
to come, the one without you in it.

And I might go back upstairs, slide my
palm under your fingers like a plate, wait
for the quiver that comes, might come
if I don’t breathe.

Why isn’t everyone screaming their
heads off? Why don’t the floors
buckle and the walls bleed? I should
have stayed longer, held you longer.

Simone, Simone. If I mantra your name
you’ll freeze with me. We’ll think of
something. I’ll think of something.
The doctors will think of something.

I’ve made it as far as the loading dock.
Simone, if you’re not going to breathe,
I’ll have to. The baby only knows
breathing and screaming.

—WT

This poem is a character sketch for the dramatic climax of the comedy screenplay, My Second Simone. The story is set in Baltimore and Geneva, Switzerland.

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

The Raccoon Abroad

The raccoon abroad
washes her catch in bourbon
before she eats.

She struts to bass beats
and looks about. Shiny things
are everywhere.

She gypsies and swings
and his eyes are the skyest
blue, faceted, yet with

no refraction of feeling.
A chainsaw clutch can be
the sweetest ringing bell,

held by the fingertip gently,

and the raccoon abroad
can play the woman of
mystery, revealing

choice shiny things of her own.

—WT

Cartoon by Birdsfoot, aka Christopher “Kit” Dyson, a Buffalo, NY artist.

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

We’re all full of possibility and problem-solving at Hippie Chick Diaries, as we plan to collect and expand the best of the site into a book! This poem is a little ditty that plucks some images from some of my other poems, a kind of a meditation to focus…

Beget this Book

A stronger tea
will carry me.

I’ll pack my jingles into a
book you can carry.
I’ll collage the
cover with clippings of
Moldova in May.
A feather of timothy.
Yellow seeds and the
bowl that carries them
from room to room
without a plan.

If Jean doesn’t write that’s
more paper for me.
This requires a list or two.
Contents, format and an
editor’s consternation.

A stronger tea.
That’s what’s called for.
Stand next to me
and think of tea.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!

Bathwater Tea

Let’s banish Earl Grey in
favor of darjeeling
but bring back the
bergamot when the
window moon sings
lavender, orange peel and steam.
Candles from your “used” box,
red, peach, lime, cobalt colors,
sit on saucers from the
set your mother gave–
If she only knew.

It’s a clawfoot kettle,
a tapwater Niagara
spills, rage into resignation,
passion into peaceful
poolfullls of surrender.
Nowhere to go baby!

Rose petals bob and wash
up, saved, on the shore of your skin.
I know that shore and
I shadow it again
in the flickerlight, where your
everyday worrylines soften,
surrender, still oil shining on your
surfaces,
rocking in pastel paisleys on the
water’s lip,
kissing your crevices,
and I climb in.

I sip from your darjeeling
and it pools on my tongue
and I laugh, still self conscious
after all these moons. Your
full breasts surface as
you accommodate me
and I dive into a fragrance,
a fleshy bubble and a
cavernous mouthful of
darjeeling, bathwater and you.

—WT

Please join our Hippie Chick Diaries fan page on Facebook!