The No More Apologizing

The No More Ligtle Laughing Blues

apologizing for going to

school instead of having

a job that made money

or babies

pretending I took the bus

to an office, paper

clips in my ears

and never that I was

reading Wyatt,

writing my own dreams

in the dust under the

Apologizing for my

hair, wild gipsy

hair that fell out of

every clip, the way the

life I started dreaming

of did. Apologizing for

the cats

You know if someone said my skirt

was too short, I explained

or said sorry but never that

I finally loved my legs

I spent years apologizing for not

having babies, laughing

when someone pulled

a baby Gerber jar out

of the closet and held it in

front of my eyes like

it was a cross. Or a star

I should have thrown that

thru the glass. I didn’t

need to explain the music

I liked. One friend said that’s

noise. Another said isn’t denim for

children? I laughed the apologizing

“oh I don’t want no trouble” laugh

over the years, pretending to cook,

pretending to like babying

my husband

The only place I said what I meant

was in poems. That green was like some

huge forbidden flower until it grew so

big it couldn’t even fit in the house,

pulled me out a window

with it toward Colorado

I apologized for being what

they thought a woman was by being

flattered when someone said

you write like a man  and for not being what they thought

a woman, for the cats and leaves

instead of booties, for the poems

When someone said how much

do you get paid,  I pretended,

pretended, pretended. I could not

stop trying to please:
 

The A, the star, the good girl

practically stamped on my fore head.

The spanking clean haunted half my life.

But the poems had their own life

and mine finally followed

where the poems were growing,

warm paper skin growing

finally in my real bed

until the room stopped spinning for

good the way it used to when I dressed

up in suits and hairspray

pretending to be all those things I

wasn’t: teacher, good girl, lady,

wife. I was writing about lovers

for years before I’d felt,

when I was still making love just on

the sheets of paper

When the poems first came

out one woman I drove to school with

said I can’t take this. Another said

I don’t know, this can’t be the you

I know, so brutal, violent.

Which is the real?

The man I was with moved to

the other side of the bed.

This was worse than not having

babies. His mother said they

always knew I was odd

my clothes, my hair,

the books I brought to bed.

They said I never seemed like

one of them

My own family thought it was

ok but couldn’t I write of things that

were pleasant? They wanted to know how much

I got paid and why I didn’t write for

The Atlantic

Look, I still have trouble saying

no. I want most of you to

care about what I’m thinking,

maybe even to

want my hair

It’s true, I put a no smoking sign up

on the door but twice I have

gotten out ashtrays

But I have stopped being grateful to

be asked to read

or to always have

a lover right there beside me

It’s still not easy to get off the

phone, tell a young stoned poet

it’s a bore to lie with the

phone in my ear like a

cold rock while he goes on

about the evils of money,

charging it to my phone

But now when I hear myself laughing

that apologizing laugh, I know what

swallowing those black seeds can

do and I spit them out. Like tobacco

(something men could always

do). Look, nothing good grows from the

I’m sorry, sorry, only those dark

branches that will get you from inside