I have a lot of stories but you are the truth

Faces in the dark.
All the same now

I rode the years with paper wings
The songs changed but the men didnt

I was along a dark path. Looked for the light

Strangers even after I should have stopped the wrestling

There Was only this
today
a perplex of pain and
searching.

You are my Knight of
Shining

The days of pain are
behind the trail of
memories.

You are my wind
and my salvation.

I Honor you.


Caroline Shank
December 10, 2024

The syllables of conversation
scatter like Shore stones.
The Gulf prefigures you
as a dream prefigures the

child.

Salt water runs through our
toes as we walk. There are
birds and wind like kisses
lick the sides of yesterday

when the screams of love

reached

Heaven.


Caroline Shank
7.6.2024

Crawling up the building, blue
jeaned, backpack carrying bugs that looked like jacketed roaches reached the sills of power.  We watch as liberty is breached, as red floods the tumbled, broken
in windows.

I am stung by the chant that
passes for voices calling for
rebellion.  It is called a psalm
of ignorance and summons the
dance of termites who chew
our lives like woody pulp.

My mind cannot unsee nor
my ears unhear the shot
that killed. The shades are
unleashed.  Will we forever
crawl with the vermin of
unhinged politics?

I am deafened by the trumpets
of liberty, justice and the
conquest of infamy!
The triumph over the winds of
conquest will today lead the
Constitution again to wings of victory.

We Will embrace Truth in
the Arms of History!

Caroline Shank
1.6.21

Never again.  Your voice like
thistles scrapes. It's tracks
unsteady.

Blood drains from the holes
dug by serrated edges.You
command the death of
Venus.  My throat expels
the vowels of the tirade
you unleashed.

To see, unleashed, the
ferocious silliness of
your torn words addressed
to the gods who long
before laughed at your

excavation of old bones
and misunderstandings.

Never again will you pillory
me, my torn lashings
       stung
in deep regret

for the years of meaning
now drawn closed like
curtains over a corpse.

One word bled from your
mouth, lifted me to my
knees.

Goodbye.

I laughed.

Never again.



Caroline Shank
2.28.2023

I never saw things falling off
your shelves.  I didn't grasp
the hands of the clock who
bore witness to your aging,
frail thoughts.  The lack of
tremors fooled me.  The
mood swings were the
arthritis, oh! the pain.

I was so little then, so wrapped
up in my own sorrow.  I glanced
up and you diminished.  We were
old, our lives run out.  You took
the memory breach as a left
turn to Heaven. You cried when
you thought me unfaithful.

Never were you so.wrong.   I
served you silver but you
pointed to the floor.  My tears
were landslides.  Tomorrow
kept coming and the ashes
rested.  I walked out of the
chapel with sticks.

The years go on and I am

so still

in the

jungle,

pray to be eaten.


Caroline Shank
04.17.2023

Bitter robs the night
of fortune.  (Send me to thee.)
Trick of my soul's tomorrow.

Bitterness resolves at death.
(Send me to thee.)
It robs the stars of light.

I am for sweetness.
This time it will not fail
me.  

Bitter is the crepuscular
time.  (Send me to thee.)
I choose the Sunlight.

The refrain of

time's repairing.



Caroline Shank

Five powerful privet hedges formed
a fence in our front yard in New York.
My mother planted them for some
reason, known only to her.

The branches grew sparse and suffered.
Failure to thrive.  Knee high to my
twelve year old body, it never bloomed
in that yard of green weeds and dandelions.

It was meant to keep the
dogs away.  We had feral cats
in the yard.  My brother and I
were feral.  My mother bred us
into the wind of 1940's Chicago.

So that was that for her.  She
retreated into madness from
Chicago to New York to
South Bend.

Fences, like my mother's
addictions, are not always seen.
They crawl up your leg like
flakes of hate.  They keep growing
until your eyes are holes in the
twigs.

A fence so thick you think
only prayers will let you out.
Easter Sunday blooms in
the trailers and filaments.

No relief.  They scratch
on your so small soul.  White
privet petals crawl into crevice
and crease.  

I no longer itch but
tic with the rhythm
of the seasons.


Caroline Shank

I am an American woman.
Rough and oddly strange.
I rebel against Dandelions,
I celebrate the omnipresent
Ladybug assault every year.

My age is irrelevant.  The
patterns in the gardens
of thought are my friends.

Some of the night’s whinning
winds wake me before
I remember you.

Time slaughters thought.
No syllables amount to
clarity of forgiveness.

I am an American woman.
I cry in private places you
know nothing about.

My God is still overseas.
In time the laws of
Harmony

will send you

also

Home.

And what will you do
with me then?

I am an American woman.
Here are my credentials…

Don't just walk on the
pages where it talks
about me.

Briefly.


Caroline Shank
Was here.
October 25, 2024

!.

To think about getting old?
Ay that is the question.
Tomorrow rapes the day
of sentiment, the curling
onion skin that never

unrolls.

Any mind cannot comprehend
old age.  The loose tooth,
of retirement falls out.

Hope falls from yesterday
when,  albeit time allows,
the young scalawag cross off

future’s possibilities as the
insensible droppings of
the cat who remain in the
corner.  The shedding of

youth’s romances.

Old age ponders through
rheumy tears the last
kisses , the shoulders
on which shawls

Droop


Caroline Shank
10.8.2024

It was a dark and dreary night.
I interrupted your journey.  Did you rush back? Your big green car traveling a familiar road you thought rolled up with me

outside.

I stood in the rain, calling.
You were unafraid.  So
many tears.  So many years.  The dizzying

speed.

My brown Chevy crumpled
on the side road where the
beach released pain
into flight.  I have no way
to reconnect the lost days.
The hospital of my bandaged


memory.

Forgive me for i digress
in my old age.  I cling like cellophane to the memories
I am alone

surviving.

Caroline Shank

50 years


ago, full of the
Righteousness of God.

He

?
who held my place
while insanity

With torn dreams, the
miasmas of lost love.

Bless me Father
you who showed
the ways to Hell

Baptizet me
Again.

The midnight (sirens
are lapping.
I stumble from
the drink of happiness

spilled on the sands.

You whose conscious is
trifled with like the fish
on the line

I eat
my disappointment

cold


Caroline Shank
Valentine's Day
   2025



Caroline Shank
2.14..2025

When the Universe lies
once

the vellum
of the Book of Life

fades.

The ink (always there is
Ink)

Sours.

You are my Page ;
play me.

You are the

Voice in my sleep.

Crying.


Caroline Shank
10.26.2024













⁹)

It is not love that breaks your heart,
Craig, it's the blankness rubbed
against sunlight on the window,
when the smear appears.  

Or not that but it is the redaction
of a life organized around
a thought ordained. I keep
telling you, the evidence doesn't lie.
It was planned and signed,
that there was no future at all.

"Go" , you say, "you can do this"

But it's the mask I never saw you see,  
it's the slice of the night's
warm wind which once
caressed me that now leaves me alone,
the darkness between
breaths bewildered
by his speech.

It's not love that breaks your
heart, it's the scream
in the ephemeral

moment




Caroline Shank

Long ago I was born.
Generations have grown
up around me.  I am
reminded of this by
a recent escape from
depression.  

Cynara.

I have loved as well as
I have been able.  But
I am not full to the brim
of life just yet.

I offer
crepuscular years,
roses that grow
in the shade, and
warm wine at
supper.

Please forgive
the imperfection
of a soul survivor.
The choice was
made by God.


Caroline Shank
3.23.20

"I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,"

Ilse told of many things:
The noises of the casbah,
ululations from the musky
throats of the wasted women.
Tent smells from a hundred
hookahs.
She had her destiny all wrong.  
It's the same old story.

Cold drinks, a hot town,
thwarted love.  
A kiss is still a kiss.

Bombs mix with the
night sounds.

Louie didn't call off the search.
The suspects lined up

The enemy blurred.

Ilse left.  
Her stillness is forever.
The gin is always cold,
the fedora is slanted
and for the moment
of the last Act:

A kiss goodbye.

Casablanca is in the night's
glare. I hold my glass.

I will always toast to love. .
ft
Goodbye is never
forever.

A kiss is still a kiss.
    
       As time goes by.


Caroline Shank

Your shade, ma, follows me like a
loaded red wagon .  You are heavy
with the fruit of your youth.
What were you like as a young
girl fresh in the breeze of
morning?

Did you love your mother?  I heard
her singing in her French
voice.  She folded into life in
Milwaukee, spread into death.
She covered you like a
cowl.

You don't cover me.  You are not
allowed. I never cry for you
and that is your naked
sorrow.

I saw you once crying for your
mother.   Are you together now?

Shades rolled over on
the window of my
days and nights.  

Go away  Ma.  
Run for cover from my
poem's imagination.

Caroline Shank

Afternoon


is when we made love
the first time. The only
time really.  It was the
shadow of four o'clock.

I remember your welcome
voice,  my shy
goodbye.

Every day I wait by
the window.  Your tan
coat and brown hat
disappear. You
vanish and I run
head long down
the years.

You fall from me like
grace.  Your face the
mold I make with my
hands each afternoon
at four o'clock.

In the window above
the lamppost I wait.

Everyday
the snow falls and
on my frozen
soul rests your
goodbye.


Caroline Shank
3.24.20

Prompt:. The word Afternoon.

Not so, really, the seat of spring,
a car of dark cloths, the voice of
boys and whispers.  Do it.

Do it, the lion sleeps tonight
playing on the radio.  Do it.

Forty years the lion is awake.
I remain in the back, handblack,
churning.  My stomach is den
solid now and hungers for the
shallow response.  The song
played then shouts out loud.

Do it.  I wrestled with it, and drowned.

The lion sleeps not I think.  I see
the mane of his black head, the
italian tomorrow of my fourteenth
year roared from him.

I did it in the maw of that music.
I held onto the ****, pretended
to feed the wimoway.  Never done.

I did it to the music of the *******
who whispered to me of the jungle.
I did it to the tune of the ***** that
pinned me to the mighty song.

The lion sleeps.  I think not yet.
Snickersnack the wimoway is
whacked low and I drown in the
song.  I did it, like a nun who fears
perdition if she drops the rosary.

The lion sleeps tonight.  In the jungle
the ******* NewYork night
pads on and on.  I don’t sleep.





Caroline Marie Shank

It's as if my life was a package forgotten on the side

of a back road.

The chance of being plucked out and found even interesting,

unconcerned.

The name addressed to Hell.


Battered by lifes footballs
the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.
Go on. I am not done with you

So says the
Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through

the bramble and thistles.

You saved me once
when I believed

In a destiny.
For such a short time

No
chance of being plucked out and found even interesting, unconcerned.
The name addressed to Hell.

Battered by lifes footballs the sunscorched wrapping illegible.
To love so much the
Contents arrive in Hell.

Go on. I am not done with you
So says the

Call of the Universe.
Your tears are large.
The last of my life.
I won't go on. I will
stumble through the bramble and thistles.
You saved me once when I believed
In a destiny.


For such a short time.

Caroline Shank

UIt's not like Dinner where you
Tell the maitre d to give you
a different slice of prime

rib.

You can't slip the pastry
into your pocket this time.

Called out for your writings,
for the chains of thought

You were
heed less in your

Society

Today's the day for
the bells

to ring. The justice.

Please EXCUSE me

I Abhor the convenient
L

To learn is to
scrape the jug.

of

The Grains

Of conversation

s. No. I cannot
marry you

Like this.






Caroline Shank
06.20.20.2

Down the pipes it pours.
Wet, earthy smelling and
warm in July.

Keep the sounds for
me.  I hear only the
horns and slather
of the wet cars.

Rain in the buckets.
Rain in the storm
drains.  The pouring
down street lamps
glowing at night.

Rain.  The song of
Songs in the Bible
of my life.

I stand still in the
night.  Listening
for your voice
in the splash of
rain

on my face.

Caroline Shank

We met in the early days of the planet.
I remember the radical color of your
amber hair.  There were curls there
that only the gods made.

I remember you.  I loved the simple
act of breathing your name.  Prehistory
awakened in me the sovereign blessing
of your inimitable love.

I remember you, do you remember me?
Someday you will be here again and
we will know the depth of the night,
the height of the day and the
remembered purr of our bodies.

I wait here on the divan of day.
You will breathe my air again.

I wait.


Caroline Shank

It all happens between the cracks.
My life to be cliche.  Light barely
flickers between the shift lines
in the cracked ground.

I worked nights for many years
in a hospital of sunless windows.
I slept badly and spent summers
lying on the mostly deserted
strip of lake Michigan beach.

A suburban by choice, I felt no
real need for company.  Still
don't.  There is always the chance
of a thought misunderstood, a
glance mislaid on the face
of someone outside.  

Lives that are sunlit and brave
always try to haul me out and
unfold my wrinkled insistence.
I wear the pale gleam of darkened
hallways into old age.

I am, by choice, a crone of
undistinguished personality.
A poet peeking out between
the veins of life.  

I am chosen to, occasionally,
shine a little light from under
the sidewalk.


Caroline Shank

Don't leave me alone with my
sadness, my madness.  I am
in the dark side of grieving.
Call to me from this side of

living.  Talk to me of the years
we spent collecting things which
still mount the shelves and table
tops of this place.  

Don't turn your back as you
left me that May day.  Not a
glance or a cough. Your silence
drives me. I am about to leave
you for a second.  Stay in the
chair.  

If I return and you have gone again
I will know you didn't love me
after all.  


Caroline Shank
9.29.2023

I would have written sooner but
I was doing distaff stuff, thinking
of Portia, and getting ready to.go to
the museum of the kind I used
to love as a young woman.

So you see it's been a busy
afternoon.  I can't write
tomorrow because the trees
will be singing in Tolkeins
wartorn back garden. I will
have to endure the casualties.

I'll try to write next week when
the irons of destiny will be
warming up and I can sit for
a minute between the starry
night approaching and listening
to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

I'm busy these days here
in my cell among the
sunflowers.

Write me back when
you are done planning
my next adventure.
I am, as always, your
own Juliette
of the Spirits.


Caroline Shank

The magic is in the jewels,
or in the swing of the
pendulums, the ubiquitous
kneading, itch

that pushes me..

No.
I stop.  I transfer my
packages, the balance
of the task I have

is

to love you on the wind,
to salvo a minute
the sound

neither bang nor whimper.

The lick of the tick of
the groin tingling
anticipation.

You are Beautiful in your
distance where I cannot

dance.

Moonlight light the place
wear we should

Believe

The Word.



Caroline Shank
08.26.2024

I remember you in
the striped backseat of Tony's
car. The red leather seat's squeak
on my cheek,
and the pearl white ghastly plastic
door handles crushed my head.
I remember.
you with your duck tail
Haircut, dark brown, greasy
with Brylcream..  
It was widely known in
those days how your deep
broken brown gaze was
turned on me one evening
when I was fourteen.

The summer was over and
Winter's
clouds were layered on like

a stripe of a
gray leather.
You used language,
harsh in hearing,.  
shallow in response.

The story
is an old one and people
told it of me, just the night when the
red plastic shined on my face,
like a stripe of a scarf.
When your second wife
was so sorry you died
before your silver dove flew
over and I  was waiting
for your

apology.  



Caroline Shank
May 2, 2022

My friend is gone,a way of
leaving, mirrors October.
    
A warning salvo is flat footed

against the failure to bond,
     A Bottle slips.

The Brandy puddles.

Where have all my

  flowers

gone?  Never a breath, never
a sigh even.

My Old is withered.
to wrong turns.
  To those who read
the magazines.

I persevere
the unwritten
untold.

There is Now.

The failure of laughter
at my expense.

I cry unheard.

The Silence.


.
Caroline Shank
January 8. 2025!


~~

To wait

To wait is to be suspended
On a slender thought.

Not gossamer but iridescence's

Shines.

Your face in the morning

Wet

Slowly the question asks
will
you?

The days and years lie in
rubble

Tomorrow's dust
degenerates,

Yesterday's
bleed from the
pain of unuse.

To wait is a crowded cellar,
sour wines,

You and your
sapiosexual
5 th act.

It  is
Another dead end

itself that

staines the
floors of
Cellar

silences



Caroline Shank
March 30, 2025

It's the wartorn pedestrian
whose  tears fall on the
heart's side streets.

Veins of regret that curl
the same pain.  It's not
the sorrow that hurts, it's
the gullibility of time's
unlearn-ed lessons.

The old suffer
most.  The pandemic
of hope again in
the release of
lyrics left long ago.

The letdown lisps
it's own goodbye, prefigured
in the drawl of soft sighs.

Goodbye is muted
and falls to the floor.

It sinks to the power
of your poetry.



Caroline Shank

I am reminded of your face
when the wind blows over me,
when the sun's light shifts
to summer.

We knew each other
in the solstice of our
lives once.  You turned to
me and the light streamed.

Remember me in that light.
My hair not yet quite white.
Remember me in the
while of time.  I was the
wine in your glass's
reflection.  You were
the glass in my
Waterford world.

Run to me.  But know I am
fragile, still afraid.
You left me in the rain.
Come to me now
in the sun
of your returning.



Caroline Shank

It's the wanting you  
The wanting your mornings, and days each wi t h their
own nights .  The Syllables
of weeks each a territory
whose river's song, the blues
of which I lay me down
now to pray for tonight's voyage


Caroline Shank
February 24  2025

I Believe for Every drop
of rain… there is a
note of wonder
A falling waters, a cataract
of stones where the
baby was born like

a song misplaced, a heart
In darkness lay in the
shadow of your lies.

My alphabet is several
runes short of the words
spelling forever,  the
never spoken, the

blue assumptions of
yesterday.

Tomorrow will be like
the sadness, it will spread
to the echoes of memory

when I believed

Caroline Shank
4.23.2024

I write you when I am labored
With forgetfulness.   I am
Unfolded. My drawn out tears
slip with a staggered downhill
run.

To my amazement I am dead.
The sounds of you pleading
have passed and in my relief
I rest on your letter.  

Time me Kangaroo down boy

I'm still in love with you.  Ha!

When you fell down the tunnel
was there a bright light? Like
in the stories? Did your mother
warmly call your name?

You didn't hear the hollow
hospital call from my torn
throat.

I will go smoke now. I picked
up the old habit from a rushing
rabbit. He said my time will
be soon and my sins scrubbed

off.

Why?


Caroline Shank
8.6.2022

Finding Beauty


in brokenness is a
fine how do you do Ma

You broke me in slivery
pieces when I was a little
girl. I am crackled like
the century in which we
were born.

You died with the tainted
Soil still on your hands.
I outlived the strangled
ivey you plaited me with.

My mends are obvious.
Gold veined patches
wind through my skin.
I am not an art form.

I am good wood burned
dark for your satisfaction.
I peel off the bark.

I found not beauty, but
redemption in the years
beyond your death.  I am
unbounded and only
slightly born.  

Life is an adventure but
to you it was a safari.
Your family was your
prey but it's ok

I have found beauty in
my life anyway.  You almost
killed me.

But...

"That Which Does Not
**** Me Makes Me
Stronger"


Caroline Shank

We are all  walking,  wounded.
Pedestrians on a planet we have
never been to before. I read that
someplace.  I don't mean to
place myself outside of literature
but rather as a note on the follicle
of philosophy. Entropy is where
I mostly find myself.
"the rest is not our business"

Do you remember who said that?
Another abstruse literary spot
on the book of where to go next.

I will write about this again in
some other poem. I do believe
tomorrow wakes us up to
new pages turned by some
gasp of wisdom.
Tomorrow and tomorrow….
is the cats contribution

She licks herself clean.


Caroline Shank
2.13.22

⁷⁷
Destiny

I want you to be with me,
to lie on beaches thrilling
to those parallels whose
loving has called us to
attention.

Wake is a carnival of
flat sand The sun.
breaks in half .

I feed on the acres of raw
loving, our bones dance
across the catcalls of memory.

They who know not
at all, the long songs,
whose tendrils ofʻsoft
salt spray are fitted

into our destiny.

wait quietly
while we dance

the finished final
notes of our

song.


Caroline Shank
8.23.2024

I have pages of prayers.
assimilated.  I saw them
yesterday.
I've
Clipped them together
with a
yellow butterfly.

Some
I wrote myself.

On nights I would
sit reading, lonely.
Days there,
were~~ sounds

remembered,~~
of music
coming always
from a farther room.

I meditate.  I fly off
to places where we
made love long ago.

You were love's young
dream.  I, a reflection.
always,the Other
side, a mirror's
back.
~~
Unreflected.

Incomprehensible.

A dichotomy
interrupted.


Caroline Shank
January 25, 2025

It's early morning and I
spend this time of colors
brightening and sounds
resonating.

Of plans still shaking
off the dew which overnight
brought life to tomorrow.

You are
kisses reflected on my
waiting tears. With hugs
waiting in my arms

for you.

The Pleasure of this are the
moment radicalized.  I
will never let you go.

Parades of Angels
pass over me.  Send
your music.
.
Test me not too long
alone  Beauty is
Loves indulgence.
Time is

Layers against
Our bodies, warm with

Each other

Rainbowed


Caroline Shank
March 8  2025
..

My life, then, hung like a
sun-yellow mobile that spun
in the heat as I flowed from
one end of summer to the other.
The songs on the radio were
my island.  My life as a girl
in the years before fences
appears in memory slides,
dressed in the beaches of  
youth.

I grew from seeds to roses in
the ground of my childhood
summers.  In the calendar of
my life as a young girl
every date prefigured you.
Day by day, in the years of
growing I bought, with the
barter of my soul, all the
heat and all the music.

Battened by the times before
you, strengthened by long
storms, hot suns, cold winds,
this, then is what I offer
you:  deep beaches, thornworn
roses, summers that flow
from one end of your life
to the other.

Caroline Shank

prowles through my geography.
He is imperious in his flat paws
and dark, voluminous gaze.

His prowl, never the same, twice
around me. Learning the veins
and arteries of memory.  He
walks the rope of yesterday.

Black and sleek, he sways,
the tension oblique in it's
slant towards the cage bars.

I hear his rumbling response .  
He shaves the vowels of his
experience.  Glares like

tomorrow the world will end
With the slap of his jaw.
fhe end of the bars

never meant anything.  He
lumbers into my waiting gaze.

I feel the cold cold stare
of night falling on me.
He smiles in satisfaction,
paces again through my
tears.



Caroline Shank
January 14, 2022

It has been so sickly
Written, so
slidlingly

Redundant

said

that one is born to
in
the night of

Souls.

The dark triggers the time,
the weather and the
style
of the

Agreement.

The  is a
familiar Address.

Shutters close and
the dressings

notes the time.

Midnight is a fools
Game.

Sleep
Dulls the material.

You are unlikely
to call for, Toast
to

Love.

I watch As stars
Rapel down

sliding,
you so
carefully

placed to keep
out
Songs and poems
that lure

these lonely thoughts
Slipping on
the tears

of your

Indifference.



Caroline Shank
April 2, 2025

Reflections
Those whose singular licks
of love grow aged and
Holy in the light of old
memories,


whose hands trace
lines on her body
in the grooves and
branches of the


forgotten, laden
with the names of
the unborn possibilities
call me in the night.


I am the listener who
Never sleeps.
I have my own stories
which trouble my pen
to widen the nights


of loss, you, and the
dreams of my


Old


Age






Caroline Shank
11.1.2024

I sink into my waiting depression
as a marble into molten syrup.
My hair and face drip invisibly on the clothes of passers by.  For
how long can the strings of
sadness wind around you?

You listen to my sadnesses
but no longer hear me for
I have frayed your love like
rope in too many attempts
to tie and, having failed, lay
down to the inevitable dirge
of my unrelenting tears.

Daylight brings the last notes
of silence.  The clamor of
tasks hold me up.  The
progression to the end of
diurnal relief and I am balanced
on the truth of nightime's
faithless tones of remembering.

Caroline Shank

I miss the real photographs.
The leaves of pictures I turn
over. The names and dates.
The high school graduation
memories.

My babies growing up when
film was their reflection of
summer and school. The
birthday parties slightly
blurred, a little out of focus.

The didital cameras next
with their zingy zoom.  A
little clearer now blurred
by tears.  

I hold these images to be
self-evident memories. I
hold them to my face to
smell the suntan lotion
and the scents of pine and
snow.  The birthday candles.

I choke on school pictures.
New haircuts each year. The
leather of first days.

The photograph albums are
stored for space.  I miss the
luxury of turning leaves. The oh wows of yesterday's Kodak
captured babies little butts.

My phone has a thousand
pictures In the palm of my
hand

I never look at but can
share in email in a
solipsistic minute and
click to the end.

Caroline Shank

It's the end of another day.  Goodnight Moon.
The sun is gone now and it runs away
from me.  Hello long hours of Sturm
and Drang.  I don't sleep until, drugged,
I stumble into dreams.

I no longer dream of you.  I dream of
the deaths of friends.  I count them.
Some are pebbles, some are rocks.

I trip into my waking hours like a
Redwood falls in the forest.  I walk
forward with a limp.  

I no longer dream of you.
I save sleep
for unimportant things.

Tonight is a blank sky.
It is tears dammed by floats
of lost time.  Unrecoverable
time.

Are you still
softly singing

"Sweet Caroline"  

to the dark horizon.  🎼 🎶?



Caroline Shank

I just found this and printed ot on AP as a journal entry
Don't worry about reading this until there is time

Today is Thursday September 27, 2001

It was a warm night. July in the Midwest has evenings that sieve the  over you like a breath, sometimes too moist, but more often than not a whisper to be wanted. She was never disappointed in the evenings. Except this one. This one was so unexpected. This evening she didn’t feel the breeze or even remember to feel for it as she did so often. She liked the Midwest summers. The cold of winter that sliced through all the down jackets and sweaters were a long way off in July and she always deluded herself for a few months. No, not really.

Every May first she would say to her husband, “Winter’s coming”. He would always give her a hard time about that. Instead of looking at the beginning of summer as a celebration she always felt it was the beginning of the end. She really didn’t like the cold of winter and the only thing she could do through it was count the days until March 1. That was the Big Day for her. It meant the beginning of the end of the worst part of winter. If it snowed again it wouldn’t stay around long and the below zero wind chills wouldn’t probably happen again until next year. But the Midwest, especially Wisconsin was tricky. April and May could still be cold and wet.

There was a trip she and her husband took to Prairie du Chine for his May 10 birthday and it snowed in Milwaukee. What a ****** that was. So May could still be cold.

The exciting springs were when she could get out to tan as early as April. The feel of the warm sun on her skin and the air spinning softly over her body was the best feeling she had ever known and actually still is to this day. Not that on that July night she expected to ever have this day or any other.

Depression is exacerbated by the music of the 50’s and 60’s. Did you know that? If you are a boomer, depressed, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a Lot of coffee, sweet and milky and wonderful that coffee is, and listen to enough Andy William’s, Jerry Vale, Jack Jones over and over I guarantee you will find yourself in pretty sad shape. When you are young yet, full of mistakes, and sure that life hasn’t a future you want, well whoops, trouble.

That’s the kicker. That future thing. You have had twenty odd years of futures that you watched over your whole life. Every year had it’s own future. When you were a kid and the other kids hated you, you could hear some voice, probably Catholic, telling you it would get better when you grew up. What if when you were a teenager and you knew love as ****, and drinking, and Really Bad choices? What did your future hold for you if you thought about it? What if your parents were so debilitated that your future looked like more of the same of that?

So then it’s July, a time of beautiful flowers. I have for many years now, in my fifties as I am at this time, believed that every flower is the face of an Angel, but when I was in my twenties I only subliminally understood this. July is when the lake is blue every day and covered with diamonds. I took a picture a few years ago of this. The blue lake in the background, a slab from the tunnel project in the foreground, they used these slabs all along the lakefront to help with the erosion problem. In front of this piece of concrete was a beautiful yellow flower. It remains one of “her” favorite flowers.

See I am changing pronouns here, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do. This is a story not autobiography, that vehicle often for the pitiful and beginning prose writers.

She is a poet and was even then. She wrote lots and lots and was just beginning to get a few things published in small literary magazines. She decided to go back to school. She really wanted to be able to talk to very bright people and hold her own. She knew she needed education. There was a whole school full of information and she loved the idea of exploring that. She loved the campus and the quest. She wanted that sooo much. But, alas, money wasn’t really available. She’d married young; she’d been very narcissistic all her life and didn’t realize she had to get a good job.

She had her babies. Her babies were the most amazing and wonderful beings. She sang to them every night. They grew up to the sound of her awful off key voice. But they did grow up listening to her.

That was debatable that night in July. She was going to die. You see her future was one of more bad choices and no way out of them. Her history, her personal history was written across her skin in the tan lines of the bikini she was still able to wear in her yard, but only in her yard, as the *** belly with the stretch marks of two close pregnancies were white even after the rest of her was tan.

She was full of rationalizations about “the kids”. At that moment they were “the kids”, but she knew they would be all right. “A million mothers die every day and their kids grew up okay”. Besides, this was about her. She was incapable of distinguishing her pain from anything else. Only the wretched who have traveled that path understand that. Panic was her master. She just didn’t know it was panic. It was many years later when the panic attacks hit that she knew what they were and got some kind of treatment. Oddly the same psychiatrist was able to help her then, with the panic attacks when she was in her fifties, the same psychiatrist that couldn’t help her that Wednesday night in July.

She was at the end of all her bad choices and lost opportunities. School had just begun. She was to take a midterm in her Anthropology 101 class the next morning. That didn’t matter. She knew she was going to get an A anyway. She knew the material inside and out. She loved this stuff so much she’d spent a long time, years, reading about this. Getting accepted into college was not easy. She graduated in the lower 10% of her graduating class from high school in 1965. More bad choices, but she really hated studying, hated everything about school except getting done with it. She had to graduate or her mother would be so humiliated, she would be humiliated too because in 1965 you had to have a high school diploma to get a job. She just wanted out of school then. She wanted to work in an office. The thought of further education was not possible. Not for her. Not for any of her friends although she dated mostly Notre Dame students, that was not for her grades. They liked her fun side shall we say. Some of them found her bright. Ace, whose name was Gary Heck, remains unforgettable as a force for her self-esteem. He really believed she was smart.

Namaste………………..


L
ake Michigan with diamonds and yellow flower










Thursday September 27, 2001 8:00 pm


There was one time she remembers with amazement and still a little humor. She was used to blind dates with Notre Dame students. She didn’t mind them. Her girlfriend ^^^ would usually fix her up with someone her boyfriend ^^^^^ knew. One of the fun things they did on Sunday afternoon’s was to go to the cemeteries around ND and look, (yea, right) for Knute Rockne’s grave. But she thought the fall afternoon’s in the quiet, cement-aged, leaf strewn place was pleasant and it was cheap. Notre Dame students had No Money, Ever. So one time she was fixed up with this freshman.

Whatever his name was is gone now but he was kind of cute. The car was packed. For once she wasn’t driving. Who was? Hell, who remembers? This guy was young, about a year older that she was. The other guys had beer of course and plied her with it. It was a riot to get her drunk. It was an ambition several of the males she knew aspired to. Oh well, she drank and got a lot of attention. This guy was really kind of shy. She knew she could bring out the fun side of him. She’d seen shy guys before and she had a knack with them. It was like making honey. She settled her personality over them and just squeezed. (She’d learned a lot since her youth in that rotten New York suburb) and found out how to be liked. Not *** exactly, but funny drunk kind of cuteness.

Well, this poor guy never did call her again. It seemed she overwhelmed him although he did seem to find her fun. Who was it that fixed her up with him? Hell, it was so long ago, and there were so many. But this was kind of mean. It seems this guy had just gotten out of a Catholic seminary and had never had a date before. She had no idea he was a social ******, but everyone else did and it was unanimous that the perfect person for this guy to break open his little piece of innocence was her. Oh boy. When she found this out she was flattered I think. ****, she would have been flattered by any attention that was evenly remotely fond. These people basically liked her and that was new and marvelous in her life.

And so it went on for a couple of years until she met * and found God at the same time and by twenty years and nine months old she was married. She was secure. She could stop working and be a vegetable. Which of course happened for a while. Poor *, he was sort of socked between the walls of his cells with her neurosis. But it seems he loved her. He still does for some reason.

This July night in question. July 10, 1974, she knew that there was no way to stop. No way in Hell she was ever going to not need attention. She was young, she was not pretty, but had nice legs and skirts were very short at the time. Very Short.

There was the time when she was eighteen and she and her friend @@@@@ were chaperoning dances for the local YMCA where @@@@@ worked. It was co-chaperoned by the local cops. There were a couple in particular who liked her a lot. One she was really nuts about. He drove a motorcycle at work and was pretty cool. But there was one who kept telling her he only came to the dances to watch her legs. He thought she had the most amazingly beautiful legs he had ever seen. So did a lot of people. She wasn’t pretty, but to some guys that wasn’t IT. She had little chest to appeal, her face was odd and quirky looking, her brown ratted hair was OK but she did have those dancer legs. And she loved to dance. When the skirts went up thigh high she was really in trouble. It was several years before she realized how much trouble.

So she left work that night, a filled thermos bottle of water, and a new prescription for Fiorinol in her purse and headed for the lake. She figured she wanted her last view of this life to be over the water.

Packed into the wooded hillside with her blanket she was like the last cigarette in the pack. She was utterly disposable and probably easily overlooked. She counted on that. She knew she needed time.

All those pills, then a last cigarette and then her “Babies” came into her head. Not “the kids” but her “babies”. Her sweet wonderful barely older than toddlers babies. NO. So she ran.

Namaste……………




May 2, 2006

I haven’t written in here in two years it seems. Or should I say “she” hasn’t written in here.

She was watching Oprah today and Terri Hatcher was on talking about her abuse and the results of that treatment. It is de rigueur these days to talk about our abuse and recovery. It occurred to her that “abuse” was the only thing she ever knew as acceptance. She craved abuse. The terrible part was when no one was abusing her. Then she knew she was trash, something to be left at the curb and picked up by the trucks with the rest of the garbage. She laid out herself in the paths of all the trashmen she could find, one after another.

It is no longer relevant what her mother taught her or didn’t teach her. She knew from her mother’s knee (or as Dr. Robin would put it her mother’s womb) that to be wanted, to be **** was the be all and end all of everything, even when her mother was calling her a *****, over and over again, it was still all I knew, all I understood. Her mother was crazy and out of control but still crying for her lost ****** self. Always to her death, drugged and calling for more and her mother.

She remembers telling her shrink of maybe 21 years that she was after all only trash. It seemed he really didn’t understand. That was a ****** only many years later, that part about him not understanding. He was a good man. He just wanted her to change her behaviour and didn’t feel like any kind of information about why she was the way she was, was at all relevant. So many lost hours, free, but essentially lost.

He had asked her when she was in Intensive Care that July afternoon after she had regained consciousness why she hadn’t called him. Frankly it never occurred to her. She just figured, she told him, that he would tell her to take 5 mgs of ****** and go back to work. He’d done that only the Sunday before the Wednesday that was to be the last day of her life. Crying she left work with her thermos and was off to the beach, perhaps to finally fertilize the ground beneath her blanket.

She had many years with this shrink. Years when just the knowledge that he was still setting her up with the next appointment that she clung to like a cat in heat clings to carpet and pulls herself along. He was my carpet and everyday I would get up and pull myself to my next appointment. Once a month. We would have pretzels from Auntie Anne’s in the mall, which I would bring along with coffee and literally shoot the **** for 45 minutes. He knew she wasn’t getting any help but he never left her. He never left her.

She was thinking today during the Oprah show that so many girls feel bad about themselves when they are abused. Not me. I felt bad about myself when the abuse stopped. It was through the abuse she found that “validation” that seemed to be the raison d’etre for her life.
She sought it, begged for it, cried for it, and panicked when it didn’t happen. When no one wanted to knead her and ply her and pull her to their own greedy selves that she felt like a failure. No, abuse was what she craved. Abuse was love, no abuse left her with only garbage to look at in the mirror.

She came running back to the one who trusted her and the two babies who were her only badges of anything resembling an attempt to do something that actually mattered. Her husband and children saved her as she crashed her car in her drug induced coma.

She got over it so slowly. She had two friends who walked her through the volumes of her narcissism and out the other end. She understands so much now. She understands, at last why *** is so awful and the trust is when the *** is not an issue. *** is the disease. *** is the end of life. It was coming back to trust that saved her that night. Running as fast as she could to the only person she knew who loved her and would save her.

Still does. Thank God!

1

My fingers separate the air
between us.  Spokes.  A draft
through each digit whistles,
and I fall through, let go
of my bones.  The sound of
crying splits into syllables,
a vocabulary of fine letters
spills on the soft brown
palette of earth.

Art oils out of yesterday’s
memory.  I leave, erased
from imagination, evicted from
form.  
thought from wonder.  We
meet on the flat sandhills
of reflection.

This thought, which by and
large constructed you, contracts
in sadness.  The distance
between us is spread against
the whitest sky.  Your image
forms like brilliance from
stone.

Neitzche said we are doomed

to live each life over and over

again exactly the same way.


I differ.  Our lives of flowers

and yes, of nails and pain

will live once in the pocket

of the Universe unshed of

all memory.


Tomorrow is not predictable.

We shovel today's minutes into

the jeans and skirts, the

pockets of yesterday.


We are trialing this day and

have not yet decided 

what to tell, and what to bury

under the rocks, the shales, 

of memory.


We will not recur 

but we will live on

together

forever.



Caroline Shank

My husband is ill and watches me
as I talk.  I clean him up and pretend
tomorrow there will be music.
We married in the
rain for luck.

Beware the white shoes that
pinch, the veils of tomorrow's
promises lie.
Shake the hair from
Sunday.

The children
are built from
undercover conversation.

We go along without a song.

We talk without a kiss.

In the still of the night
memories splurge.  The
flat back of the sax

plays out of tune.




Caroline Shank