My First Collage

Do you name collages? I thought this kina captured some of my everyday life, incorporating a fast pass from last year and a small rendering by local artist Ursula Young of SF victorians.

Découpage

I am tired again.
I have lists and lists
of things to do. I take up
the juvenile art of
collaging.

This helps my hands feel
as if they have produced
something. Perhaps
they will sleep at night
instead of strumming
with regret.

I cannot cut straight edges.
This requires a tool.
I am buying tools for
an art I performed in
elementary school.

The woman at the store asks me
if I’m working on decoupage, and
I don’t understand her, even
though I speak French.

But what have I saved up
all of these scraps of
fabric and paper and buttons for
if not this?

It’s true, I kept them
knowing there would be this
return, this curving to childhood
pastimes.

My grandmother tells me
she would collage anything
when she was a housewife.

Tired

I can’t see you
sitting in front of me
I’m blinded by your
dominating beam of light
that shoots straight through
my past.

Here is what happened
after seven years,
we were tired of trying
to maintain… we broke
away from each other,
I met someone new
you met someone new

she wasn’t so unlike me
but not so much like me either
you are moving in together

We both stop following our
delicate vegan regimes
because we are so tired

Tired of the carefully-
worded explanations, the
uncomfortable moment
when you refuse a seemingly
harmless dish and end up with
dry salad.

We were always prone
to giving up. Each night
when I got home from work
and you were on the couch
watching television, I knew
you had given up something.

These are just small things,
The deaths of animals,
the endings of relationships,
they are so tiny
on this planet
in this universe
it makes me tired
to think of it.