panic attack

You put the records on
You push the buttons
You take your memory back
Down that tired highway ten

Just close your eyes
Swallow the tears
Maybe you'll wake up driving
Through that tunnel again

And you'll hold your breath
Like you always do

And you'll open your eyes
To the blinding Blue

Of the Santa Monica sea
And the beggar at the light

Where you passed on the groove
From your car turning right

Don't think of it tonight
Don't think of it tonight

Everything will be alright

Dream a sweet vision of a flower in its vase
Beautiful, helpless in its place
Cut from its source

It would have died in water or land
Time is short, give me your hand
Rebirth comes to everyone

Everything will be alright

sono donna*

I passed them in their clouds of smoke
I am a woman now
Leave the fuming trails behind
Twisting in the air
I can't compare, I can't compare!--
My husband to hers
As if my lover was worse
As if I were under some curse
Why am I so calm
With a man and his knife?
My heart is soft
My heart us hard
Remember the days when I laughed

I looked at a divorced man

I looked at a dead one, too

And when I looked at the sick man

I felt his sickness through

My blood, through my bone

And a strange sensation of being alone

In this marriage

In this house that is not a home

I am half mother

I am half child

Escort me down in the dark

i hope to wake

It started with a fury when my daddy pulled the strings
I felt like a guitar, like someone else was playing me
And now I'm here and I don't complain, I just don't understand
Why I'm walking in my sleep, a stranger in my own land

And I don't know why my mind opens at night
And I don't know why my lungs feel so tight
I will never know why
Darkness is light
Wrong, right
Black, white
...Everyone's fists here are clenched for a fight

I hope to wake today. God forgive me. I'm tired of sleeping.

You know, Oscar taught me something I recall every day
Since the time I read my friends like characters in his play
And I think of them back in their cozy white halls
Where I hang an ideal, like a frame on their walls

And I hope to wake today.

lit

I was born angry, like a firework
My mother had no lunch on the 4th of July
I was filled early with the whitest flame
Some Holy Something I could never deny

And when the flame was lit
All my colors burst
And all my pieces fell in places
Where the others thirst

Ashes for ashes, my firework
I was too much a rainbow for the night-time sky
I took a plane to meet the sun
No food in my stomach, a tear in my eye

moving

The scent of my mother's home settles at my feet
It wraps itself around my bones in welcome
I watch all her treasures march out the door in royal retreat
My childhood echo chases in desperate plea to stop them

The red wall is white and my blood grows white too
I unhinge each knuckle from its grip
I can't sit here forever in my indoor forest
Blackberries sing of summer but I can't take another trip

Here God was always good to me
Here sheltered from the crowd
And now this knowledge makes me sob out loud

We have no claim on our home
It will soon return to dust
But oh how I treasured these skins--even with lust!

Here comes the transformation
Here comes the change
Here comes the emptying

Swallowed in the love
Lost in the missing
Exhaling all of our fears from this being