Ordinary Jane

I can’t remember who said this to me, or where I read it..but I for a very long time believed I was. I believed I was different from every other girl in school who wore their socks well below their ankle and I wore mine high up to my knee, I was different from all those skinny one’s in little skirts, my skirt hung below my knee and I weighed 60 kilos on my 13^th b’day. I think we all like to think we are different in our own way, that we stand apart from the crowd, the crowd defined as anybody who would ideally follow a norm, fashion, ethics even. I again for a very long time believed I had that something that, in my absence people would remember me and say “hey, remember..she used to say this” but the truth is we are all, most of us, very ordinary. I did nothing different than what was expected of me, which of course nobody expected anything very different from me to start with. My reactions to most things is regular, my body with all its imperfections, is ordinary. My mind..very average. My heart breaks just as easily as the next person, I am not the most sensitive person in this world as I thought. Online quizzes put me in the typical 75% category. I change my answers to fit into the 25%, knowing its cheating I go back to my first answers and yes, I am like everyone else.

And I am not always going to be the love of anyone’s life. Nor am I going to be the one that made them feel things they never felt before. I am not the most beautiful partner they have had, nor the most glamorous or tasteful, or funny or special. I’m not the first or last to touch them in a certain way. And I am not the only one who has made them feel love. I’m not. I’m just me and that is the only thing that makes me different from the rest they’ve had. Just my name. My identity, which may be my own, but is also like a million others. When they leave, I will be just another statistic, a name. Nothing more.

No, there is nothing different or special or unique about me. And sometimes there is solace in that. There are fewer expectations. No mountains to climb or valleys to cross to prove my worth or love. Never mind that I may be willing or even able to do that. I try to tell myself that it’s better this way. I have nothing to prove or live up to.

Changing the world one spit ball at a time.

If you were to meet me today, I’d be running an errand

Shopping for groceries, picking up laundry

Driving a fairly plush sedan, dropping kids off to school and

say, get a manicure even

 But you did not meet me today

You didn’t ever get the idea that I am a poet

You met me when I was half drunk on local hooch

Slurring abuses at the sky for snowing too soon

And too much

You met me when I was threatening to rip apart your paintings

And break Beethoven’s albums across your back

I told you I could drag big boys across the hall and

punch them in the face.

I shot spit balls at a man zipping past in a plush sedan

You met me when I asked a fur sales man if his shag was for sale

I raced the rat chasing cheese with my last jug of hooch

And you asked

What’s a girl like you doing in a dump like this?

And I said

I am a Poet, a Wanderer, a Nun, a God

And you threw back your beautiful head full of hair and laughed

You? You... a Poet, a God, a Nun, a Wanderer?

Then I am Humphrey Bogart

I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right

But you still look so good to me

And thanks to that randy God

Who wrote this poem.

Orange

Let me tell you this

Even if it’s the last thing I say to you

This is not an orange.

This is an experience

Orange orange orange

Complete.

I peel through and

hidden under translucent skin

Wet with cold water

I bite into it

Lord, more orange flows down my chin…

Another bite

Who said you had to peel them apart?

Chew and spit

while thinking of a prince who wouldn’t laugh.

Curse of the citrons,

Morgana your underpants are a hoot.

A childhood story.

I bite in

Chew, spit, swallow

There is a feeling of waterfalls

and endlessness

there is electricity and hope.

Then again, this orange

Will be over soon

Morgana you enchantress

My hands will be empty

Savor savor

There is a funeral march beginning in italy

king of clubs, your son laughs no more

your imaginary kingdom in ruins

I hide away the mangled mess

as you walk in a tight tee across my car

followed by a girl half your size…

orange dripping down my chin

I leave off a small belch

and stare at a dirty ashtray.

embarrassed you look away

Write you must, you said

What should I write about?

Oranges for all I care…

But, write you must.

in love

I am in love with Dali.

in love with the man

who will not let me burn

no matter how I try to fight him

he paints with my ashes 

with the lick of his paint brush. 

I am in love with bukowski

the man who told me the heart roars like a lion

at what they’ve done to us at what they’ve

yet to do to us. is there any difference?

I am in love with shakespeare

the man who saw how ridiculous we are

and laughed at the tragedy, wept at the comedy

I am in love with vonnegut.

with tolstoy.

with nabokov.

I am in love with salinger because

god knows

they won’t love me back and isn’t

that the beauty of it?

I am in love with edgar allen poe

I like the way they say he died on the park bench

the empty vodka bottle to his side

the hollowness of it echoing my loneliness

i like to tell myself I loved these people

because they understood me 

but they do not know me.

i know me.

i like to think i do.

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