Hurrah for Spring (a rhyming poem in cursive)

i found this poem while helping unpack mom. i love that she saved it. i wrote it when i was 8 and when i knew cursive. my kids think my poems aren't poems because they don't rhyme. this poem rhymes! and it also has 4 exclaimation points in 2 stanzas so there! 

everyday

how do you be
what you are not -
everyday
putting yourself on
like an ill-pressed suit?

losing all day-hours
until you unlock the door
and smell the decay
of what you left

you take yourself off -
settle in a pile
to lay in wait
like a backyard opossum

until the alarm of dawn
reminds you again
of who you are not

Dreams of her Dad

Nothing has changed. His notes still come to her on yellow, legal sized paper, torn neat at the perforations. With black Flair ink, he mixes equally  his capital and lower case letters, his cursive and print. The notes start the same  - Hey! How ya doing partner? - and always contain a twenty dollar bill – got lucky on the Brown’s game & want to share with my pal,

his signature, a capital D, underlined next to a few x’s and o’s.

When she wakes, she feels she has won something, the twenty fresh in her hand, but the content of the letter drifts away and the emptiness is great. She finds herself seeking signs of him, in a cardinal flying by, in the face of a customer, anything to bring back the dream, to bring back his note.

Is he doing this on purpose, sending letters rather than visiting her in dreams? Is he disappointed in the way she lives, in a studio apartment that smells of pesticide and rattles next to the el? Is he upset that she is bartending and beginning to go round in the middle from beer and shots that carry her through the double shifts?

When she gets to bed, bar sounds ringing her ears, the dream skulks back to her as if waiting for her all day. Little clues - a flash of the note and his hand, dark from age and bluish from poor circulation. There is something he wrote – a request? A complaint? She remembers a detail, a hand drawn map with a star and an arrow.

She slips to sleep and dreams again of the map on the lined yellow paper, and again she won’t remember that he is writing to request that she bury him. It has been too long, he writes, and my pen is starting to fade.

where'd it go?

where did all of the Kennedy half-dollars go 
Arthur pulled from behind my ear
and i stashed in my jewelry box
that had a ballerina and music?

where is my 10th birthday
Panasonic Toot-a-Loop
radio, playing '4 dead in oh-hi-oh'
while i cut paperdolls in my bedroom?

where is Ed, Annemarie Singer's
step-dad, who ran over a tricycle
and a Big Wheel 
in our double-driveway?

where is all the stuff
that defined me:
-my Jane Fonda shag
-my unicycle
-my rhyming poems

calligraphy

black ink
announces the marriage
of my lover to my friend

{i love you, i choose her}

perfect curves
stain the linen,
thin as a veil now

smelling of wet bark
from it's cigar-box home,
companion to shirt buttons
and a bobby-pin

size matters

does it matter the size?

the small regret of dying my hair blonde at 15,
it turning orange instead

the smaller regret of ducking my head & averting my eyes
passing Bill W. in high school hallways

the smallest regret of failing to sleep with Mike Mc.

what size are the regrets pointing fat baby fists
at my hallowed & hollowed self?

in a pressure cooker

there is something freeing about writing or attempting to write poetry, that is different than writing prose or memoir-y stuff.  i don't use the lines &  messy is good. when i am not worrying about lines it is good, when i allow myself to jump around it is good.
i had a many angry pages because of the boston shit. boston shit and snow on my birthday. and angry isn't freeing, it is stiff and linear. i could have filled pages with fuck. 
atrocities committed by a child the age of my child. 

you blew up toes & tibiae & tendons -
ahh, alliteration in your obliteration,
rhymes in your crimes -
and they say there is no poetry in violence