I Wrote a Book

Hope you like it.

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

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…

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.