Resolution

New Year's Resolution

Dating sites don't bring relationships, the sea of attention fills a birdbath the size of the Pacific Ocean called a heart. No, that sounds bitter, there are nice people on there, I'm a crummy picker.

An adult relationship stalls when the one party fails to introduce their children or include holidays or is often sick at the last minute, too many rain checks is a bullhorn.

Years of caring wore my boots, soles have holes and stitches in the sides, they leak rose lake. Work boots need softening. Step on summer rocks and frozen puddles makes leather fit around your bad toes. The nail of the big toe becomes ingrown from repeated pounding. A heifer gave her hide for riding boots. It’s not the climb uphill that breaks a soul, it’s the down curves when sliding on clay kills.

It’s a spell arriving. Butterfly lighting is a trick to make a portrait flattering. Shade wrinkles with light. Recite poetry in the cabin, say the rosary to the cows bellowing on the hillside while I garden, and no longer wear makeup on the weekends or spend money on packaged beauty products. Rose petals, lavender pods and organic herbs are in my secret creams.

Haze grew after your infidelities. Stool too close to a pink sweater in the bar. Incoming nasty messages and hacked places I frequent.

You cried. Things warmed for a moment, then returned to amusement park physics. Everyone said to give it up. But I'm no quitter.

I lied to myself about the joy verses pain scale, then I decided your dip in dots were too expensive and I am cheap. I don’t feel better, the future this opens a place for a partner to come in who treasures me. Time doesn’t heal, don’t let them tell you that garbage. Our minds play tricks to create new wiring and life circuits are busy. I'd pray for wisdom; but, the God I believe in doesn't get involved in changing events in our lives on earth. Free will to love, free will to miss, free to hike on.

 I hold you in highest regard and wish you well.

New Year is a clean start. Time for me to care for myself.

Carole Stevenson

 -  Shared publicly

I know this man. As a woman I am so sorry. It took me 12 years to move Paul McCarthy  on. Eclipse Messenger   You must know there is a third and fourth woman involved - lookup Mary Joe or M J Stackhouse 

Garden Loved Sestina

Garden Loved Winter Fruit

                    Sestina 

Day Linda writes zero degrees without attention.

His awful silence saws her spine as sinewy knife.

Despite prayers / absolution, superstitions grow.

Dig trenches for olive tree wind break in garden.

Does future Ouija press oil to help blisters heal?

"Do time in her wrinkles," says the cruel mirror.

Daybreak french braid tresses without mirror.

Sections combine, hold steady pays attention.

Sing over under olly olly return sunshine heal.

Sound echos pain, rubber band clangs a knife.

Sage drys, aloe bubbles, salves in the garden.

Seeds of forget me not's barb sanguine grow.

Scorpion grass hitch - hikes on souls to grow.

Don't turn your jaw look upon a winter mirror.

Damn ghosts steal prism light in zen garden.

Done recall the man's text detailing attention.

Dead memory on dry hands balances a knife.

Dregs starved, mud evaporates, tears to heal.

Nights crack because grief therapy can't heal.

Tendril connection bind, cease mind to grow.

Terror think to escape the love of your knife.

Teach Linda to sway joy angle for the mirror

Talk kind, become: don't care girl; attention.

Taste chocolate tomatoes warm in our garden.

Bury your discarded fire ashes in the garden.

Broken urine combines with nitrogen to heal.

Behold: circumnutation coils for attention.

Bold Coral Bells Passion Vine starts to grow.

Become Artesian well of citric acid in mirror.

Marigold pyretherum cores bugs with a knife.

They tell you its time to put down the knife..

They irrigate, pour chloramine on the garden.

To be you, ball gown gorgeous in that mirror.

Think about the steps the feet dance to heal.

Those corns, old blisters from work grow.

Touch her  heart  with  listening attention.

Knife cuts out nonsense  about attention.

Garden winter fruit cures, satin time to grow.

Mirror mercury glass water logged to heal.

Caroline Gerardo

copyright December 2, 2016

Dedicated to Elaine, Lainey, Lucy, Carolyn, Kait,
Maggie all wonderful Poets

Saudade

Saudade missing ~ echoes of your footsteps gone ~ bees humming in heart. #haiku

carolineauthor

Saudade a Portuguese and Galician word for longing for someone or some past event that I was fond of which is now lost. It has closure. The object of missing may never return. The love that remains, and the love that stays after someone is gone. In love relationships we nurture and the other may leave out of balance. Our children we care for must go to find their destiny. When a dear one passes away the feeling as if they were calling us in the hour before we wake. 

Hold fragile shells for me.

Caroline Gerardo

copyright August 6 2016

Thanksgiving Mourning Wing Sounds Poem

It is Thanksgiving in Canada,

there is an opposite season in the world.

October sunflowers return on the hillside in random rows.

Seedlings from my colossal variegated propped up blooms.

A cherry tomato gone wild is more elegant than Monsanto’s.

I was honest last Thanksgiving,
but he holds his own version story.

How long will the healing process take?

How should I know?

My life has an egg timer, there are three mouths to feed.

After years of caring, the heart does not want

 to let loose the guide rope so easy.

A hot air balloon unattached to the basket

mid-air mid-life wanting to stay connected.

Missing the sound of the girlies wings.

Pruning of my hybrid teas does not change

ramblings of climbers & stray hummingbirds.
I am happy in my soul.

I stopped filling the feeders,

 I gave up the trail with old haunts,

until my fingers bleed at the cuticles,

but still that sprout gets into my dreams.

Poem: Rear View Mirror

Rear View Mirror

Caroline Gerardo © copyright 2011

Adam will feel shame again.

A fox’s venetian red coat glows.

His heart desires raw chicken.

Breast not feathers, and entrails.

He steals the best parts.

counting his krugerrands

some lesser will clean after

You will feel shame again

motis operendi drives the vehicle.

Conquer tuck under secret wing

Search the fingernails

 bacterium destroying soul

Wash the container, recycle new love.

Don’t use the rear view mirror.

Don’t send an apology to absolve yourself.

In time you will feel shame again

but never understand what you made to ash

Caroline Gerardo NegativeSuck Magazine May 2011

http://negativesuck.moonfruit.com/#/wordprompt-6/4551014523

Love Sonnet Gone Wrong

Lizzy your letters do not reveal about being homeless, living in a Chrysler station wagon with no seat belts.

I too deserve a Moorish Portuguese castle.

Was time different then, moments between a woman and a man were something other worldly?

Naked I wait as a noblewoman in an Etruscan painting,

laying upon Carrera marble in Bal a Versailles and gauze.

A mind wanders back to that city of stone.

In the days after the floods, as young lovers we waded in the muddy waters taking the ancient furniture of strangers to the third floor.

He told me, “Strip down your clothes.”

Then he kissed me softy.

I did not care about the douse in cholera water. We survived.

With only scurf upon your skin for protection, let the artist heat the wax of encaustic and smooth it over me, for it will open my tristful pours.

I memorized a Rumi poem for him.

“I impetrate you to hear the ruby speak in his native tongue.” He kept his head down looking at his fingers on the Xbox controller for Black Ops.

“Fire up ovens of boiling sweat burning desire and cool slowly the pigments added.” He did not divagate.

“Use minerals from Madagascar and places you know nothing of.” Still he has no answer.

“Break into someone’s house when they are away on vacation. Pretend the children belong to you. Tell them many lies about the future.” That one got his attention.

“Shut up I am playing.”

Becoming his Telni in Devdasi tradition, ask for more every day.

Then one day he is done with you. He might call you on his cell phone to say, “I don’t want you anymore.”

Do not call to Saint Sebastian to stop the bleeding to shore up the holes in your heart.

He fails to listen carefully.

Send a chorus of attorneys.

They know nothing of sonnets only billable hours.

The finest doctor thinks you loony.

They blame it on lead, radiation and chemo therapy from cadmium.

Drinking mithridate from a Riedel decanter will not tear out the poison heart of diamond.

Only it will grow harder.

Poets To Put to Memory: Ruth Fainlight

Ruth Fainlight poetry takes time to read. She reworks the words sometimes for years. Her writing is lyrical and longing.

           

" On my right hand since then

 I’ve always worn the ring

my father and I chose

as my twenty-first birthday present.

On my left hand, these months

since her death. my mother’s ring:

the engagement ring he bought her

half a century ago,

and gave to me, after the funeral.

...

I spread my hands on the desk.

Prominent tendons and veins

on the back, like hers;

red worn skin of the palm

that chaps and breaks

so easily, inherited

from my father. Even without

the rings, the flesh of my hands

is their memorial.

No need for anything

more formal. Not gold

 nor platinum and precious stones

can serve as well

as these two orphaned hands."

Ruth Fainlight

The hands which do not bear her parent's wedding bands, they are the genetic following of her beloved Mother and Father. Ruth gets to the center of grief, loss and carrying on.

In our fast paced world of u-tube and noise, take some time to memorize a few lines. I can feel the sound of the words when I recite Ruth's work to memory as I walk.