Failings

furious pile
of laundry
mocking my
meager efforts
so what
I rocked as a mom today.
I say fuck you laundry.
I can do dishes tomorrow…

***

Read this.

Seventeen

It hasn’t been the same since they changed therapy rooms. She hasn’t been able to be anonymous and obsessively poet doodle, short tight bunches of truncated prose, ugly word combinations uttered in her head as the energy from the room swirls and colors and dissipates. She is afraid that she says too much. She is afraid she doesn’t say enough. She realizes talking is granting help just as much as listening. She makes the ugly brave request to talk about the abuse. To try to actively get to that part of the gigantic sore in the innards of her mind.

Do they always say innards? Never outards?

The week she asks for this discussion she leaves group shakily optimistic and somewhat regretful. While driving someone honks at someone and she is now in an aggressive driving situation. And that settles it. She has asked for trouble. She is now under attack. You see, he even controls the cogs of the universe, weaving the very loom of the fabric of fate itself.

Don’t tell, he knows, he knows. He keeps his promises.

He even finds a way to affect her lover’s behavior. She cleans up other messes too. She is the master of cleaning up messes, of walking on eggshells, even tap dancing on them. But the bad things keep multiplying and threatening to topple all her safe towers.

She is aware she shouldn’t need towers. But now, all her stuff is here.

A reprieve is granted and she gets another week to avoid the talk, avoid her own bringing on of pain, she has scraped herself till her ions are charged and magnetic, bringing the bad with her every attempt to be safe in a world she feels can only be UNSAFE, dragging around floating space garbage-like woe.

***.

The talk goes worse than she ever thinks it could go. The expected number when thinking about HIM, but an unexpected number for her lover.

This cannot be so and she is angry. She is not still a victim she is wrong and she is angry and the woman is wrong and group is wrong.

She thinks she can tell her lover, to prove them wrong. That his reaction would not be the angry unsure reaction of an abuser. She doesn’t think this man is an abuser. He is the abuser. She means was, she thinks to herself.

Unlucky seventeen.

Wish He Would Too

I guess because I can’t say no. Is that why? my mouth is always full and my eyes always dry…is that why I cry? Why I can’t see the top of a hill from the lowest dark little valley. Is that why I feel it’s so hard to be me? Why I can’t stop medicating my pain, why I can’t sit with it a while, get used to its sting? Because I’m a nicer mom, when I’m sober and a smarter wife and maybe even a better person so I wish I’d stop filling my mouth and my body. And I wish he would too.

Triadic Self

i find myself here again. and fault myself for that.
i know i gone and fucked up again. i fall and all. i crash.
i am aiming for the bottom when I go back to the top.
and start again.
old habits. old friends.
my flaws, like rabbits
darting behind solid objects. i lack progress.
its obvious and true. without starting again.
i disgust my next false start. again and again.
doom. till. death? get busy living and making decisions
accruing debt and getting wet. confront the month
on each bloody turn. get it right. get it now.
is this the same lonely rock in the same puddly spot light?
possibly under a romantic lampost prostrate on a lumpish dias?
my victim doll cutie lips
non-protecting bystander lint dervish silent pretty girl
abuser i am monument to pain verbally sensitive
controlling none

i’m willing to pay for relief

We Are Going To Live ( So I Am Not Alone)

“It’s ok to tell me the good things too.”

The Builder says in one of our bed time conversations. I do make my husband out to be a monster. I do. Because I’m hurting and alone a lot and I don’t want people to think I’m ok. Then, they might leave me, might think I’m ok.

Someone has to be looking for me. Someone has to look OUT for me.

But there have been changes made. Things are better, and I am hopeful.

We are sober! I have a lot more energy and this strange sense of guilt and fear has slid away.

The babies, I feel so much more love for them. I am still craving my poisons, obviously. An addict is always an addict.

I am in group therapy. He is going to meetings.

It’s all emotional hard work, but the good kind. We are going to live, and that’s final.

Inaccessible Diagnosis

She makes me a promise
she knows I need. She knows
I won’t hold her to it
if it’s not meant to be.
 
There, a dancing in the place
where we are dilapidated falling down
houses of a ghosted neighborhood.
In a deserted thicket of forest
 
we run and get out of breath
as we chase each other and play
with our skirts bunched up and scrunched
by childish fingers gripping convention.
 
She knows how I get there.
She knows how I came.
She knows how to get there
and how to remain.
 
In comfy grass, heat bug symphony
notes tickle her nose.
I will join her with clean
feet and leave her dirty.
 
Buried there, by our roots
a treasure of two.
A measure, a brew of all
that is true.

School House Rules

There got to be a

rhythm to these things in life. don’t you think? Times when what you feel is lucid, but obscure.

you fall from height to hit soft pillow

you climb a mountain to pursue a valley

there is no fear, know this and packs on backs on the way to the next clear thing.

Nevermind, what was the last clear thing…

mothers milk with crocodile

orange rind mind smile

set the table, braid the bread

or maybe just go instead.

possibly henchmen

smell elephant

on a rotating spit of unlit hickory pit,

I said not it. no room for fools.

that dont know school house rules.

Thrown Valve Moments

Oh the glorious moments after the children are bedded down. I settle myself in my evening safe space, laptop, blackberry, weed, bowl. Lighter. The pressure valve that’s thrown, the release of a big puff of air when you realize you survived another day. Another whole day of kids and husband and life. Disasters, holidays, happy days, homework time, random moments of a practically spiritual nature. And laughing. What else can you do but laugh a lot. That’s how you get them there, give kids roots and give them wings, as my friend Libby would say. I’m sorry I can’t give them more and I’m proud for what I give them. I agonize over every misstep, every fall back and broken expectation. Like fractured glass. Then, there are spelling tests. 96! And the LittleOne says “Mommy, can you scratch my back?” And you do and she throws her head back and says “Ahhhhhhh.” And you can’t believe it!

It’s worth it. For these thrown valve moments.

Mini-Rant II

I would be a whore.

You know what’s funny? Money. I don’t mean in a ha-ha sense, but more in a what-the-fuck-ouch-that-hurts sense. It means I eat and do drugs to forget I don’t have enough of it. That I can’t pay the bills and skate from late notice to late notice. The fact that there are people around me who have way more and I don’t have enough to survive. And yet I do. How socialist of me, to ask that things were a little more evenly divided.

Why should I pretend I’m not angry about that?

Because it’s tacky.

And against the American belief that anyone can achieve greatness. The decks are not stacked against us. There are no societal boundaries or class prophesies. There is no deadend cycle or morose pattern. Anyone can achieve greatness.

And if you don’t, well. It’s because you don’t DESERVE it.

So yea, I’d be a whore. I’d do anything to lift this boulder weight of worry off my chest. ANYTHING.

BlandState

you leave your shoes
when you go out hopping

between her and me and baby makes three
swimming the grey puddle betwixt

its amazing fur stays fixed, murky white after your nights
you leave your shoes

cant say I’m bothered by the silent
on my porch, at two or three

cuz when you’re with me, its dirty
not the fluid putty pile

that makes me, her and her smile
you leave your shoes

by the bruised tile mile
then you usually float a while

and baby usually rocks a while

***

for dVerse Poetics , gorgeous painting is by Borg de Nobel and its called Dreamhopper.