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.

Marriage Song

Uncertain.

I can’t make you.
I can’t save you.
I can’t see the boy you were.
I’ll never know the man you will become?

Because it’s not certain,

not in-sight.

Tired of being the bitch-wife, bitterly

you look at as mom.

Tired of “being” right and being told I’m “wrong”
Such a tired Wedding Song.

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.

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…

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

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.

You Are So Expressive

Is the point really in all this talking?
This question in demon times
to scarlet sun baths.
 
She asks:

how long haven’t I talked about it?
I mumble,
what’s the relevance
of
this
question
when the words are gushing from all directions?
Palm cramming and finger diking fails
 
there is no end and I say it’s all been said before.
Is the point really in all this talking?
 
Yak your words and grab someone else’s.
You take mine and it babbled,
you, an ear to a shell
catching ocean words seductive and desert words dehydrating
 
my way of saying:
Cant there be any way,
the newest say of my ways?
Understand me?
 
But still leave. Or still grieve, or still kill.  And still tear asunder.
And reason!
What about logic and reason,
their neighborhood here
with block party assertions
within grammatical nations.
 
You objectify my tale
and straighten to my wail.
You can seek to set me free
to fix my sad and lonely
where I’m home and sorry.
 
Lets go down in shame flames,
causing explosions and rains.
Press this broken heart under
unrequited language cider.
Exercise my foolish word fish
 
You are so expressive,
she said and tho expensive,
the words mean nothing
to her
unanswered question.

The Nothing

There is nothing.
I can even appeal to logic
experience
reality.
I can point out the obvious
and dress up the truth.
I can cajole, act aloof, bring
the bitch out.
 
He still loves me
and wont be baited.
He wont be rushed to come to
my foregone conclusions.
He wont jump from outcrop to outcrop with me
but shouts from the top of his tower,
 
the tower I describe,
embrace,
draw attention to with sticky, outstretched fingers.
It’s all there.
It’s all there except the true name.
 
You allude,
I imply.
You exude.
I reply,
like a good girl should.
So
why don’t you
be the man
(to me)
I know you are…?
 
There IS nothing.
This is true.
I just didn’t know nothing included you.

Some Understanding

Why didn’t I trust her more? That’s what my mom asked me today. Shocked when I reveal I have PTSD. Angry that I won’t look at her, you can’t be perfect! Have I ever expressed any disappointment in you?

Even then I was tap dancing, doesn’t she get that? I so wanted to be the wonderful thing in her life. I wanted to make up for my dad and all his faults and abuses. I would be great. not only great, I’d be the best and it wouldn’t be for nothing. Do you understand that? It wouldn’t be for nothing if I was something.

Perfect people don’t get raped. Once raped, forever ruined, broken, busted, disgusting, damaged, broken, violated, pussy pussy pussy, did I mention broken? Why didn’t he insist I tell him? Why didn’t my dad DEMAND I tell him? Why didn’t he go out and defend me like he did my brother? Why didn’t he fucking realize my need? How that left me all alone?

Fuck you. I didn’t tell you fucking people because you’d never understand. No one can, so whats the point in talkin’…

See Me As You Were

You can pick one in this life.

You can pick one and have that one.

If something comes, if someone comes along, someone who is supposed to be yours, not your wife or husband, but YOURS, that’s different.
 
It’s hard for the one and for the one who receives the one.
 
How can you deny yourself me?
 
Shouldn’t you be SO proud I am yours, so proud someone so talented, smart, clever, loving is yours?
 
Shouldn’t that surrender feel like the biggest gift you could get?
 
You’ve tied my hands since.

We can’t talk about it, like what I need that you have given me and hold back from me now.

This is a death, over and over. I don’t know if I should walk away. I don’t want to. The list of things I want…
 
If I beg here, right here in public, Big Daddy, would you make it all better? Take me back? Tell me you love me and I’m your Baby Girl again?
 
Because I will. I will beg.
 
Please Daddy. Please. A million times please.
 
Know I do not want to replace your true love, know I don’t want to destroy all you have worked so hard for, know the two can exist.

We could have a healthy relationship of no consequence to your marriage.

You think you can just ignore this, that we can suffer thru with the chaste digital existence. That is not living. Denial.

Yes family is so important to you and I…mine…

Maybe you do see what I see or see me as never moving on and always demanding more.

This is not prayer, but a desperate plea that you see me as you were. 

You did love me.