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.

Concordant

I don’t have trauma,
I have history.
Protection is suffocation,
perfection too hard to keep.
I’ve buried my treasure too deep,
forgotten the veritable weep.
When I regain my true self,
I wont be afraid to use words.

The Death of Me

there is

no poetry

like real

life

This Is Why We Say Good-Bye

Im not teasing. Im frustrated. Its hard for me tolerate so much negativity and self pity. Im sorry but thats just the person I am. Im sorry youre having a rough life. I cant help much.

Desensitizing

I will not miss you
of winsome wine and velvet
roses will be planted
ivy intertwined

I wrap myself in books
’cause others
may look like me
wilting epiphanies

I cultivated her
purple pointed, lingering green
she was seen dancing
at the tree line in the sun

there comes a time
for concentration or distillation
in my cups, my ground
a drop on my tongue

home-brew
I’ll watch for you

Rule Fucker

I miss him and his body.
I only saw pictures. I only saw words. I only heard voice
of everyday prattle. Design
but so divine, so MINE.
The rules always fuck me.
One time, they will protect me.
Farcical fantasy,
man for me,
destiny.
The builder has been deconstructed.

No end to those who can live without me,
lonely little fuck rule
squeals me. Build me…

I want to say
what to the men who seem to know me…
Don’t desert me,
bereft please be
due to lack of me.

Something essential: fuck me or leave me.

Same Places

I’m falling asleep to the thought of your voice

A grip on my choice to keep thinking

Am I sexy?

You repeat it again

A woman

Built of words and revelations

Would you be let down?

Would you bring me up and then drink my desire?

Use your laugh to smash all defenses

We shall lament

But we shall also dance.

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.

The Remains

The shootings in Connecticut leave me raw. She with the Blackish Brown Eyes is exactly 6. I can’t face that the parents dropped their kids off on a Friday and will now never see them alive again. It’s so unbearable. I have no reason more than others to hold on to that sadness, but it lingers. I pray and weep during the vigils and ceremonies.

I come in to work very upset about gun laws. Thus enters the man from Southie. He was a cop at one time; he has no problem with guns. As far as I know, he might still have one.

I know better than to start the discussion. Gun believers are the worst in their temerity, in my opinion. And peace is such a simple concept to understand, not so simple to achieve.

And yet, I do. I do start the discussion because earlier another father of two I know says he has a gun. Locked up, of course, rendering it totally useless in the case of a break-in. But his willingness just to possess one angers me. He does not hear my argument as logic. I back off and let go of the fight. The man from Southie, like always, gets my wrath.

I start to get angry when he insists on the freedom to bear arms. He won’t tell me why…why does he believe it? Why does he want to carry and keep what are only devices of death and destruction as an option for people in a society without proper care for their mentally ill? He becomes angry.

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.” And he walks away without giving me my answer. I decide to hate him. He has no reason, and I am right and now he is an instrument of death in my spoiled, little girl mind. I hate him because I’m scared and he has made himself a target, the poster child for the pro-gun movement.

He always takes the brunt of a woman’s anger, swallows it, turns it into something hard and hurtful inside his stomach, worrying himself into stomach ailments and sleep disorders. He can’t seem to apply his lackadaisical attitude in life to the female population, you can see how he craves love, routine, understanding.

I would worship him if he asked me. But that’s another story. So this is our relationship; I’m a little girl, he is the father yearning for his daughter. How we sip each others empty and digest what we need from it.

We aren’t talking. He is in his cube and I in mine. Three cubes from him, someone starts banging on the shelf over their computer. She is choking. I laugh at the ruckus at first, thinking its just typical acting out. Then frantic tones mumble thru my ear phones. I do the Alex P. Keaton chair slide to look; our coworker is not breathing. And the man from Southie is performing the Heimlich on the choking woman. He is perfectly calm and willing to try to save her life, regardless of if he can’t, regardless of a what a huge failure it would be if he COULDN’T save her.

That’s what he does, he steps up. That’s how he is a man. that’s how he is a DOMINANT man. And that is how he is Boston…