Words from Inside My Head

thoughts she’d had but hadn’t kept 
inside her head, things he didn’t
want the family

to know, like we’ve done with mother,
but for other reasons; those thoughts
she had written down.

were maybe not insane, and yet
they’re not at all like thoughts I’ve had,
coming from my brain,

thoughts meant to make sense of life, things
we ought to do; now, if I were
to write advices

of any worth, they’d have to have
some reasonable ideas
of paths to follow

for recovery; mine seem to
include some specks of past regrets
springing from someplace

inside my head. In the shower,
where I find myself thinking, I
go back to mother,

and how she had said on my first
wedding day “you can always get
a divorce”, as if

marriage, my marriage anyway,
was like a job you could quit
if you didn’t like it,

not a permanent commitment.
I’ve never known what marriage was,
I’d thought it was some

kind of a love thing. I didn’t 
know, no one had explained, or if
they had, I had not

listened, or if I had, I hadn’t
comprehended, it’s some kind of
promise you don’t walk

away from because your feelings
are hurt or you’d had a fight, or
from fear the other 

might leave you first. But I digress.
Still in the shower, I recall
I’d heard my father 

was planning to leave my mother
as soon as I graduated
high school, but he went 

and died four months before, so she’d 
lucked out, and yet I wondered where
did I hear that? And

was it true?  I’m thinking it had
to have come from my grandma, but
she wouldn’t have said

it out loud, not to me, and I 
couldn’t have read it in any
of her diaries,

so was this wishful thinking, (hers 
or mine?) maybe as my mother
readied to marry

Larry, rival since high school of 
my by then deceased father? They
could always get a

divorce, and so they did, by the 
time two years later when I got
married, then followed

my mother’s advice, not quite two
years after that, advice that
should have been erased. 

Syllabic Verse