Poetry through the Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Toying with him,
like the dolls
who used to play
her children.
Lifting her skirt,
she tries to
draw him inside.
Fingers like birds
fly away, arms
dance in the air.
She pouts.
Feelings hurt
when not believed,
she plays her
torture game
until he’s bloody.
* * *
darkness and
silence ‘til
the monster appears
spilling our secrets
like your seed
on the ground
You don’t know me,
she yells.
You don’t even know yourself.
The light in your eyes
is new.
Never there before,
in the bloody days.
* * *
She wipes the pain
from the corners
of his mouth,
remembers a time
when they kissed.
She sees the new man,
the one who sacrificed.
She hated him once,
but now believes
he can be good.
He hurls his faults
at her like weapons,
begs her to end him.
But he’s not the enemy.
He’s been losing time.
Waking up in strange places.
Hating the face staring back
from the mirror.
She doesn’t hate herself,
not anymore.
She may not love this man,
but she believes in him.
In what he’s fought for.
In how he’s changed.
In his ability to do good.
And that may be enough.
Though my heart no longer beats,
it still aches, the past sour
like blood in my mouth.
I don’t want to remember,
but that song keeps taking me back.
Strolling the night,
smoking cigarettes in bars,
I seek truth.
When truth remains elusive,
I take out my flask.
One girl follows to see if I’m good,
but I’m more than a little bad.
That gets me pretty far most nights.
She likes me better when I sin.
They all like me better.
But sin no longer satisfies.
Filled with sorrow, yet no way to repair,
I bare my chest and ask to die.
She refuses. In dying, she says,
the good disappears with the bad.
She knows both. In me, in the world,
and certainly in herself.
The truth bleeds and eats away at my heart,
making me remember so many lives taken.
That song makes me remember
the pain I struggle to forget.
* * *
Lies.
The ones who love us tell them.
Lies.
Lies to lay us down.
Lies to wake us up again.
Convincing us that we’re to blame.
But they’re not real.
The words, the lovers,
both mainly in our heads.
The pain? That’s real.
The truth? Lies.
Dancing
the bossa nova
in the kitchen,
studying
in the library,
she comes to me,
the one who died,
the poet.
Not my love,
but one who says
she knows my love
now that she’s
left this world.
It is her voice
I hear singing
in my ear
late at night.
Darkness blows
through the door,
knocks out lights.
Only black and
white remains.
Are you here?
She knocks.
Are you okay?
She’s not.
I smash the radio,
but it keeps playing.
I smash the microwave,
but it explodes.
I cut my feet on the glass
and she speaks to me.
Her voice is clear,
then nothing.
My heart
an ancient hole
she cries into.
I feel her again,
the pain larger
than a limb lost.
Not phantom pain,
but real,
penetrating pain.
All sounds return.
Her voice,
the bossa nova.
She stands before me
in white,
a goddess
to my troubled life
after all the storms,
the hurricanes
that destroyed me.
But it was not
my love,
the poet,
my mother.
The dead are dead.
And I am on my own.