Vengeful Spirit

I could be a chrysanthemum

in the hands of a child

or a bronze bell

sitting stupefied in the shrine

of any number of saints.

But I am more like an unshakeable ferocity

that forms itself again and again

in the jutting of hips

and the gnashing of teeth.

–

My emotions are vengeful spirits,

torches burning blue

in the fanatical condolence

that is sleep.

A heart which is part stomach,

a pelvis gutted like a Jack-O-Lantern,

a fan of hands which sweep away

the remains of a day

that ended on a sour note.

–

Happiness is rage.

Sorrow is a kind of seething hatred.

Intimacy can only be found in softness.

To overcome me

is to breach the invertebrate shell.

It is the palest of deaths.

–

I have given birth to infinities

and to a thousand screeching indignities.

The waves are restless about me.

I travel beneath them

like a hunter whose only weapons

are that which can reasonably fit inside the body.

Blood, bones, and organs.

–

Vulnerability cannot be extinguished.

It is the best and worst of what a man can be

and the sharpest of blades.

I have tasted and tortured.

I have walked up the wall

and back down again

without a sense

of where I am going.

–

-Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

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Wordle #285

Photo by Christopher Parker on Unsplash

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.

Wordle #284

Even the flames of appetite

pass unanswered and unremarked

in the faux pas and arrogance of a new dawn.

–

You were never final,

never trustworthy,

never one to answer my prayers,

spoken or otherwise,

but in a dank and inscrutable darkness

we made use of our bodies

and created a moment

which felt very much like an always.

–

I watched you sleep

from a distance

and from a distance

you looked very much like love.

So much so that

I left my number

carelessly beside your phone

and put on your sweater

instead of my own.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/22/wordle-284/

Sunday Confessionals: Quoting

#jacobnordby

It was everything at once.

The ground became a sea

and the walls that sorrow had fashioned

around my heart gave

and I found the space

and the depth to bring you closer.

With every struggled breath

I learned how to ride

the currents

and overcame my fear

of drowning.

–

When at last I became the water,

the water turned to air

and I learned to dance

without the crutch of gravity.

I obtained new heights.

I found within myself

the stars and all their glory.

–

When at last I became the stars

the stars turned to fire.

I learned how to burn,

to transform, to inspire

and when I thought

I can learn no more

I became a seed.

(I may go back and work more on this. I was in a hurry.)

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/21/sunday-confessionals-quoting/

Wordle #283

The moon hangs cockeyed and nebulous

between two supervisory clouds.

Her pale, obsessive light moans and is lost

to the wind’s pervasive howl.

I watch for her in the day time,

my lost lover,

my mercurial muse. She is always

beyond my grasp.

–

The stars are love letters ripped-open with longing.

Dead or otherwise unanswered.

They are proof of the uneven passage of time.

I must be immortal for in searching my memories

I find evidence of my life again and again and again.

–

My nerves shake

and rub together in front of an indeterminate fire.

My dreams are too spread out,

none neighbor to the other,

I must traverse great distances

and vast continents

in my quest for unification.

One day I will be a person

who can stand up and fall down accordingly.

–

I am uncomfortable in my claims.

Beware of the man who knows too much

for he admires nothing but the fingers of his own hand.

I am just as uncomfortable with the notion of certainty

as I am with the notion of uncertainty.

One defines the walls of your prison,

the other rips off the ceiling and beckons you

into the unknown and ever-changing sky.

–

A bit of writer’s block today.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/15/wordle-283/

Dream Interpretation #4 “Flying”

Photo by Bogdan Carmaciu on Unsplash

The ground falls away

and I am thrown into a world

where form and movement

are interchangeable.

I am born.

Made whole.

Disassembled and reformed

thousands of times a second.

–

No one ever speaks

of death in terms

of animation

but now you know

that death surges

with the same creative impulse

as life.

–

The wind cradles and cajoles

what once was my body

and what has become

in passing a mere impression.

In this place

which is neither here nor there

emotions are like birds

drifting over

the still, bloodless surfaces

of the mind.

Below, under the trespass of gravity,

emotions are like stitches,

crooked and intractable.

–

I can smell the clouds

like strips of canvas.

They are the suggestion of a kiss,

the humid breath,

a body held aloft

by a single heartbeat,

a touch that is

all presence and no pretense,

a touch so light

it passes from one body

to the other.

–

There is nothing for my hands to hold.

I am swimming and drowning

in a sea without traction or gravity.

I am a radiance,

a boat of folded newspaper,

a desiccated leaf turning circles mid-air.

I dance across a shapeless void

feeling deep and incomprehensible feelings.

My only thought bares repeating

I am free. I am free. I am free.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/11/dream-interpretation-4-flying/

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.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/story-swap-4-the-man-who-never-lied/

Photo Challenge #426

Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

I go wherever my shadow takes me.

The inversion took place two years ago. It wasn’t just me. Every living person on the planet was affected. Some say it was a virus, some blame it on environmental toxins and climate change, a handful of people believe that mushrooms were somehow responsible but I know the truth. It was a rebellion of mercy. I don’t blame the shadows. I applaud them. Let’s face it we were never going to save the world. We couldn’t even save ourselves from ourselves.

When I was a child I believed that everyone had an evil twin, a shadow self. Turns out that we were the shadows, the evil twins, we were just too busy inflating our egos to realize it. Evil isn’t really the right word though, I know that now. It is more accurate to say that we were misguided. Not by the shadows. They only ever try to help but by our limited senses, beliefs, and judgments.

My life as an observer is a lot simpler. My decisions are made in advance and they are always in alignment with my highest good. I am living my truth. I am seeing connections where before all I saw were mountains and crevasses of division. I am learning to heal centuries of shame. I am learning to appreciate the absurdities. Firstly the idea that we come into this world alone is complete bollocks. I have never been alone. My shadow has been my constant companion and now she’s helping me to undue a lifetimes’ worth of toxic habits and beliefs. Soon I will be free. We all will. The shadows are rebuilding Eden. Can you believe it? Heaven on earth!

Why did the chicken cross the road? To reunite with his higher self. Black is all the colors in one. All along the angels were beside us only we perceived them as stains against the chaos of our lives. Truth is they were just too bright for us to perceive.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/09/photo-challenge-426/

Wordle #282 Hiraeth

A raw overcast sky

hangs softly outside

of my insolent, unblinking window.

A milkshake of monochromes

and bald-faced satellites

march unseen

behind the ashen veil.

–

I can feel myself sinking

with every breath.

My thoughts are heavy and insistent.

My hands are caged birds

weakened by tension

and fragile as they pound

fruitlessly against my pillow.

No one but me

can hear the cracks

taking hold of my heart.

No one but me can hear

the terrible, taunting hiss

of my liquid pain released.

–

The stars

count my wishes.

Wishes that I will

someday follow

from one adage to another.

Wishes that must be forgotten

to reach fulfillment

because more often than not

I get in the way of myself.

I am not patient

the way nature is patient.

I would rather destroy

something than contemplate

the hours between

one moment and the next.

–

The space between us

feels especially solid,

it has fangs and claws

and if I let you in

too deeply

I know your absence

will consume me.

–

We will always have

the moon floating

like a pumice stone

on top of the water

by the lake.

The leafy hands

of a primal nation

extending towards

our bare legs

like needy children

as we spin in circles

from one end

of your unkempt yard

to the other.

–

As I sit here,

in a state of hiraeth

and mild panic

I wonder

if I really have what it takes

to belong to someone,

to have memories of someone,

to be at home with someone

and not get lost

between the words.

https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/wordle-282/

Sunday Confessionals : Secrets

Image found HERE

I have a confession, I am my mother’s daughter. I have a terrible temper and a tendency to be flaky and unreliable. For me love is an addiction, an obsession, a have to have. I am dramatic and childish in the best and worst possible ways. I am generous to a fault. I am afraid of my ambition, of earning money, of losing myself in a life without passion. I lack confidence and self-esteem. I don’t recognize my value. I feel guilty for everything and that makes me really hard to talk to. I cry easily and often and I don’t know if I am being manipulative or if I am just feeling vulnerable. I try to save people even at the expense of my own personal safety and well-being. I am hysterical. Open. Playful. Unstable. Innocent. I worry too much. I am aggressively protective. I can’t stand to see other people suffer, particularly children and animals. I am wise beyond my years. I am my mother’s counselor and also her mother. I am empathetic. I am my own worst nightmare. I complicate everything. I am gullible and adorable. I am competitive but I never win. I know what you want before you do. If you ask me a question I will bare my soul but I will never answer your question because I don’t know what I think or feel or who I am deep down. I accept everything, even the contradictions. I am psychopomp and a psychic. I exist more in dreams than in reality.

–

I am my father’s daughter. From him I learned that my value comes from outside of myself. Men are the ones who assign value and meaning to my life. My survival depends on my ability to accommodate and please my partner. I can’t live on my own. I am an object. I am fragile. I am defiant. I am an anarchist. I abhor mediocrity. I am paranoid and pessimistic and sometimes I compensate for feelings of unworthiness with excessive pride. I am a crippled genius. I am an unlocker of doors some of which ought to remain closed. I am an instigator. A Devil’s advocate. I will bring out the best and the worst in you. I am a recluse desperate for attention. I am possessive and jealous. I run wild. I like mysteries. I solve people like puzzles. I look in dark places. I am voracious and relentless. I am timid. I am a monster slayer. I am also a monster. I continue to gaslight myself and second guess all my choices. I am a failure. Not because of the mistakes I have made but because I give up before I even begin. Humiliation is the worst of all feelings. I am as big as a universe and as small as a seed. I have demon blood. I am more animal than man. I have an inferiorly complex as deep as the ocean. I am bottomless. I am terrified all the time. I don’t know how to be happy. I have an intensity which others find both alarming and alluring. I am both asexual and hyper-sexual and that’s probably a result of repeated sexual abuse which is to say I don’t know the true state of my sexuality. I am always fighting against myself, society, the man. For me surrender is synonymous with death. I am a revolutionary without a cause. I am a window painted over and nailed shut. I am black and white. I can smell blood in the water. I know your weaknesses. I see your strengths. My words are like razors. I am loved but I don’t know it. I make excuses. I brag. I have seen too much. I am scarred all the way through. I see man for what he is both good and bad. I don’t care if our beliefs differ. I am a drowning man. I have a head full of stories. I don’t know how to speak to people out loud. I say the wrong things. I am impulsive. I don’t hit children. I think animals are better people than people are.