Wordle #285

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All the flowers in the garden have been plucked and repurposed into halos, vase-fillers, and oracles. None of which have served me particularly well. My life is mostly decoration and sleight of hand. People enter. Bridges burn. Hearts puncture (my heart has more holes in it than a colander).

I still view everything through the speculum that is trauma. I am vulnerable. I am exposed. I am open from the inside and stretched to my limits.

I am an ordinary person living violently at the bottom of a well. I have no outstanding features, unless by outstanding you mean distinctive. I am a pile of bones woven together with flesh and red string. I would rather be a kite than a thimble-full of brackish water. I would rather be a catalyst than a consequence of reason but you can’t have everything and that’s why I settle sometimes. If I could have everything then I would have a cabin in the woods, an attentive lover, a Pagan wedding, the soul of a poet, and the heart of a dog.

The sky is gray and gluttonous I pour my sorrows into the rain and the mud that wallows underneath my chilled feet. I have no stories, only rancor and a vague but unshakable sense of hopelessness. The only service I am capable of offering is lip service and like anyone else I search for meaning wherever I can find it. Mostly my life feels like a series of roundabouts and one-way streets. I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast. I dance when I hear music. I think in words. I feel in words. Sometimes my soul comes loose and I drop to my knees and wait for the moon to strike me dead.

Just gibberish rambling. I have been writing intensively for several days and now I need to recharge myself.

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Growing Back My Virginity

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In the blank, covetous darkness

you reach down like lightning

and the whole of my soul

surges forward in a greeting

that is simultaneously

obscene and disconsolate.

We both know that nothing

will come of your touch

but for several minutes

we bounce gently together

our bodies pressed tight

as a stack of porcelain plates.

In the heat of starvation

we evaporate slowly

and I hate to say it

but months of anticipation

have turned to something

that feels a lot like

dread and indifference.

If you crack my bones

you will find nothing

but ink and the cinders

of a once formidable fire.

I don’t want to be

forbidden, excepted,

a penumbra suspended

fitfully between two worlds.

Rainbow Adjacent

Photo by Rhett Wesley on Unsplash

Never surrender to pretense

when there’s a door

or a window or the faintest flicker

of the vacuity and vastness

that is conscious awareness.

Let your laughter dissolve

the clouds that overshadow

the fiery indolence of youth

and lie down with me

on a sun-saturated patch of dirt

underneath a tree

who speaks to God

about the seductive wisdom

of certain fruits and reptiles.

We can get married

and arrange things together

in organized piles

and pretend that wishes

are our best kept secrets.

For example I promise

not to test the water

before drowning

in any adjacent rainbows.

The only halo

I want wrapped around me

is your smile.

I don’t have wings

but my hands

hardly ever touch the ground.

There are so many ways

to strangle the life

out of a relationship

I never thought

that my love for you

would become a weapon

until I realized

that its content

was mostly rocks

and that what I took

for sophistication and spontaneity

was just a sly way

of crossing the street

without being recognized.

Magic like everything else

turns out to be real

right up to the point

that it enters into the eye

and in that still, viscous pool

everything takes on

an air of artificiality.

Deep down I think we know

that nothing is real or realized

outside of ourselves

which is why

you are an angel

and I wear a grin that looks

more like a bread knife

than a waning crescent.

This is the third poem of the day. The others I am planning to submit. I hope this one came out okay!

I am that wilderness

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I have too many emotions.

They stick in my teeth,

in my twisted viscera,

in my glowing red heart

in my stiff grey lungs.

They are my hands and my feet

and all the spaces in between.

Feelings can’t be ascribed

to any one organ

they rise up between

the solid bits.

They are a void.

They are eternal

right up until the moment

of exchange.

I am inconsolable

whatever my orientation.

Viscous and viral

there is a wilderness

so wild and so vast

that no map could ever

hope to translate it.

I am that wilderness.

I never have

the same emotion twice.

Each emotion is its own construct.

The only thing which is certain

in me is uncertainty

but that does not

bring me comfort.

I sleep hundreds of hours a day.

I am the dream, not the dreamer.

I do not wake but every now and then

life comes pouring in like salt water

and takes me to another place

and in that foreign place

I take on the arduous task

of drowning.

Add Me

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

My heart became

a magnifying glass,

a weapon of light

and ongoing deformation.

I do not mean to burn with love

but I am desperate

and lacking in imagination.

All eyes and no soul

my heart looked into yours

and fell against its little bone door

with fear and trembling.

If I let you in

I will never be free of myself.

Eyes opened or closed

you will always see me.

Love became a thing,

an extraordinary and incomprehensible thing.

Even if I give doubly of myself

I will never be able to earn it

because that is not part of the exchange.

I always seem to be missing

something and that absence

creates a distance between myself

and the object of my interest.

How can 1 plus 1 be of more value

than 1 times 1?

Multiplication seems so powerful

until the numbers are forced

to confront the possibility of solitude.

Maybe we need each other to grow.

Maybe that’s why my value never rises.

When I think about it

I have been searching

for someone

that I can occupy.

I want to be a ghost

in your home.

To be with you,

to be seen and not seen,

to possess intermittently,

and above everything to dream.

I have been struggling with Depression fiercely lately even though I feel I have so much to rejoice and have been on some lovely adventures lately and have also received tremendous support and love.

Loneliness

Photo by Geoffroy Hauwen on Unsplash

I wait for you

as if it were myself

that were absent.

It is strange

how a body

filled with blood and air

and countless,

infinitesimally small lifeforms

can feel so empty.

Every moment can be

traced back to you,

especially those moments

which have not taken place.

I wanted you to be there

spilling past my margins

like sunlight through a window.

In the presence

of ecstatic couples

I think of how it might feel

to connect heart to heart

with another human being

and it haunts me.

Given the right angle

and the right intention

I feel certain

that our bodies

could become singular.

But the stars never overlap

and it seems

that I am meant

to occupy my own

solitary space indefinitely.

If ever my light

should touch you

I hope that you

will think of me

and remember as I do

all the things

that never happened.

Story Swap #4 “The Man Who Never Lied” vs The Woman Who Couldn’t Tell the Truth

Photo by Lucas Gouvêa on Unsplash

Gaslighting is defined as “manipulating someone by psychological means into doubting their own sanity.”

Here is the truth. The last time I spoke to my father was on his death bed over Skype. A significant portion of my family was present for the reunion. At some point he asked me why I had never told him about Isadora. Aside from my mom I had never told anyone in my family that my father molested me. How could I answer him without exposing the truth? I didn’t tell my father about my daughter because I feared that he would, given the chance, do the same thing to her as he had done to me. I knew that even if I never left them alone together he could still do a tremendous amount of psychological damage. My father was very clear and very persistent when it came to his views on women. He was, in fact, relentless in his sexism. He steered most, if not all, of our conversations towards sex and the inferiority of women. He was often drunk. Often belligerent. Completely paranoid. And most of all dangerous. So I decided that it was better for me and better for Isadora if I cut him out of my life altogether. This was one of the best decisions I ever made but how could I say that to a room full of our closest relatives? Did I really want to expose the truth of my father on his deathbed? I finally answered “because it wasn’t safe.”. I didn’t elaborate even though he pressed me. Eventually he said “it was all in your imagination.” Referring to the things I didn’t say about our relationship and in that moment everyone in the room understood more or less why I had disappeared for such a long time.

My relatives had questions. My mom answered them honestly on my behalf and they believed her. One of my aunts came forward to say that he had raped her as well. By far the most difficult conversation of my life was the conversation I had with my father on his deathbed. Although he never admitted to the truth, he did, in the end expose himself.

I kept that secret from my family for 30 some years. My childhood was one of secrecy. I was told how to feel. How to believe. I was given a version of reality that didn’t match my own. My beliefs, my boundaries, my emotions, my well-being none of it mattered. As an adult I still question everything I think and feel. I question my motives. I accept other people’s version of events over my own. I question my worth on an almost daily basis. If I feel sick I question whether or not my illness is just a way of avoiding my responsibilities. If I am sad I question whether or not my sorrow is just a way of evoking sympathy or manipulating the situation. If I am angry I question whether or not I am being selfish and unreasonable. I even question my existence at times.

I believe that to make other people happy I have to subdue myself as much as possible because no one would love the truth of me. So for all of my life I have chosen to live in a kind of bizarre compromise. I am half-way myself. The half-way bit goes off like a bomb in mid sentence. You just never know when I am going to surface but when I do I am full of a lifetime’s worth of subdued emotions and forgotten dreams. I have learned how to endure a lot of things. Abuse. Neglect. Cruelty. Failure. Disappointment. Sorrow. Indolence. I have not learned how to endure Happiness. Love. Success. Unity. Reciprocity. Praise. Productivity. I have a sense that emotions aren’t really an act of endurance, that life really isn’t a contest of how much you can take before you break.

If you asked me what I wanted in life more than anything. I don’t know would probably be the most honest thing I could say because I have spent my life on the fence. I can’t tell which feelings and thoughts are mine, much less which thoughts and feelings are coming from fear and a desperate desire to run away from myself and anyone/anything that could touch upon the truth of me and which thoughts and feelings are coming from love and a need for expansion. Right now I am faced with the choice to move forward even at the expense of making a mistake, or acting with bad intentions, or misguided emotions, or from a place of fear/avoidance, or risking my comfort because what else can I do? I have spent my whole life hoping that the truth would be louder and more insistent than my doubts but if doubt is what I am conditioned to perceive than truth, whatever it might be, probably wouldn’t even stand out very much to me in the beginning. So mine is a quest for truth and in the process I might lie quite lot because I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t or maybe I do know but I just never learned to believe in myself.

Wordle #280 and Dream Interpretation #3 “Unfinished Songs”

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Photo by Jamakassi on Unsplash

A cluster of butterflies

should be called a jest

because of the way

they tumble through the air.

We were wild once,

our gardens ripe

with forbidden fruit,

our words falling

carelessly into space.

There is no cure

for love

only a slow

amelioration of guilt.

The heart

which exists

within and without

is turned

so that the nerve endings

are totally exposed.

My blood is sludge,

it pools and gathers

in the spaces

that you once occupied.

When I close my eyes

I am vivid

with your memory,

vivid with the taste

of my tears.

Tears that run both

hot and cold.

Tears which beat

against my cheeks,

gentle as pixie wings.

If I were diaphanous

I would accompany you

to the dark places

and the bright places

simply to be at your side.

In a universe

where time does not

move in a linear fashion

forever is an unbreakable promise.

A day eating sundaes in the park

could be eternal

or it could be two shadows

devolving in the light

of a new day.

I am inside out.

Humiliated.

Alone

with my memories

both good and bad.

I am not sick

so much as fallen.

God may not love me

any less

but you do

and that hurts

more than enough.

To you I am the enemy,

the interloper.

I know too much.

I understand nothing.

We lost each other

in a simple game

of hide and seek.

There are scars

where the stars

should be.

Furrows

of indifference.

Dreams

without fire.

Dreams

like small bones

which crack

when tested.

To me you are life itself.

I miss you

sounds trite

because you

were and always will be

momentous.

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