Wednesday, December 31, 2014

One Line of Poetry

You stole the sparkle out of my eye

You took my big dreams
Shoved them into a box and told me how little I'd done

People tell me I think big, like its a compliment
Only because they never saw the giants that used to be my thoughts
Before you strung your "can'ts" together, made a rope and brought my giant to the ground
Now only a shadow of what it once was

You stole my wings and taught me how to walk
Taught me to think I'm better for not flying so high
There's so much less pressure if you stay on the ground, right

I wish I had known how afraid you were
How I could handle failure but you were more afraid to think of the possibility
Than to let me try
And sometimes I swear you want me to say thank you
You look my disgraces in the eye and say
 "Aren't you glad that was a big fuck up instead of a giant?"

I should be flying
Should be letting my giants free
Shouldn't be blaming you because I let you get to me

I shouldn't be putting my fear into strings of words
Hoping they can pull down the walls of my heart
One line of poetry at a time

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

My Pride

I ran over my pride

With my car

Repeatedly

I cleaned my tires

I ran over my pride again

Repeatedly....

I took it to the backyard, threw it in the swimming pool. A few hours later I went back out, fished my soggy, beaten up, useless pride out of the pool...

I hung that useless shit up to dry.

I'm finding new things to build my life on.
And it's terrible.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Time Doesn't Change

I wrote a poem 7 years ago

It was titled "Contradiction"

I'm partially embarrassed that there isn't one word in there that isn't true today
I guess there's only so much time can change

I am still a 18 year old girl
Freshly broken and bruised and ice
With sarcasm that can shame a grown man
Hoping that there are more beautiful things that what she can see
Laughing loudly trying to freighten her own ghosts

Believing that she was made for more
Than the life she's living

Painting

Lifetimes are paintings

And sometimes I feel like my scenery was chosen for me
That these colors swirled into a battlefield before I was done cleaning my brushes
And mixing my colors
Imagining a life that I knew I could have
... if I just reached far enough
Kept my arms open wide enough to suffer the pain and catch the love

Because they're never too far apart

I knew my life wasn't going to be easy
That no one was going to give me anything
That like everything else my love would be found dodging bullets
And that the most important relationships would be lived stepping over landmines

Because someone taught me to distrust everyone
Before I realized it and there were moments when that felt like a fortress
Like the only protection in my painting

But now
It pisses me off

I have been fighting for a lifetime
I am hiding behind things too tired to think of offense
I'll settle for this hole
Where I tried to dig enough space to heal from the last bullet

War is confliction

It is uniform and chaos and freezing between episodes of being trigger happy
It is fear and panic and unbreakable bonds

And I am all these things

I am uniform
I am fear and panic and unbreakable bonds
I am excitement and laughs because I might be dead by the morning
I am love and hope even when that mostly looks like devistation
I am bullets and knives and trying not to break

I am so many jagged edges that everyone who gets close to me snags their life
Or gets a wound that may never heal
I am sharing my shards under pretty dresses and flitatious smiles

I am still hoping to throw this all away and paint a new life.


Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Separated

By the time I realized that I've had too many lovers 

It was too late to take it back

There's a reason that my most intimate relationships have been lived in celibacy 

Because there is a canyon between my heart and my body 
Nothing reminds me of the distance more than hands on my skin 
Speaking of the distance it takes to get to my heart
The barriers between my body and the whole of me 

I couldn't stomach the thought of the first two being the only people
Swirling around that place in my life

I found 3 in a haze hoping he could at least take a third of the space 
Give me something else to think about 
The same way I felt with 4 and 5 and 6....

Until I realized that stacking blazed disappointed on top of tragedy 
Doesn't make anything better 

It just makes it harder to think 
Gives more pieces to sort
And further separates me heart from my body

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Sorted

I carefully stacked the thoughts in my head
Afraid that they would climb the walls, seep into the paint, and start moving closer
That they wouldn't have a home

And it's getting cold outside

I carefully stacked the thoughts in my head
I laid out a plan
A 12 step program to stay away from Lexipro
And I was on task
Minus a few people I didn't know where to put
Or dreams I didn't know if I could believe in anymore ...

A few kinks to work out
A few smaller piles to sort
It felt manageable
... Like I might know a few things I want for the first time in
Forever it seems

I perfectly stacked my dreams
Most important on the bottom
I'll get to it later if I think I can handle disappointment again

I stacked people
Sorted more like
Into piles with labels
Future and Past
Closer to who I need to be
And keeping me down

I moved people between positive and negativity and asked myself
... How much more if this can I take

I'm trying to live intentionally
To love unafraid for the first time
In forever it seems

But your surname broke me

My life is not sorted quite as well as I want it to be

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Seat Belt

My heart is walking the line between numb and bad days

I can't bring myself to wear a seat belt
I'm tired of walking or crawling from these collisions
With but mere bruises ... and bumps... and what appear to be surface wounds

Because it really does get easier
Not to feel
But I fear my apathy most because there lies no future
No hope
Which seems to take the most energy and I have none
I'm at the end of my rope and I can't figure out what I spent it all on
Or if I just don't know how to take care of myself

I do not know if you also vacillate between need and apathy

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Skeptic

I never intended to love your laugh
It all happened by accident
And your eyes are the fear that drives me mad

I didn't mean to forget the world when I'm with you
But I did
And realized I didn't want to come back down to earth
Never wanted to think through my doubt
But just get caught up in the moment when I realized how your arms force me to relax
Give me rest I've been looking for
And with you it was impossible to fight back
And fighting is the only thing I've ever claimed to be good at

I don't know how to combat the unpredictability of your love

I don't know how to live day to day with you and not lose myself

I don't know how to trust the heart of a skeptic
I don't even know how to trust mine

I Knew You

You taste like salty kisses
It was the first line of the first poem I ever tried to write for you
Thinking I would look back on you fondly ...

The salty kisses used to remind me of the past
I always remember the way that your sweat felt on the palm of my hands
While I touched your back as you lay on top of me
The years went by and I still remembered
The salty kisses on your shoulder while you lay on top of me
Unknowingly symbolizing most of my life...

I know your skin like prickling discomfort and fleeting pleasure
I knew you as a predictable lover and a temporary drug

I knew you as death and forgetfullness

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Hole

There's a hole

It feels impossible to cover
Mostly because it is

It's in my chest and I've been trying to fill it
Asking people to stop noticing it

I stopped looking in the mirror.
I don't look in the mirror because it looks back at me
And I see exactly how incomplete my life has come to be

I grew up thinking that with age I would find more things to fill my life with
More things to make life full
To make it happy
But I've been shedding
Leaving pieces of myself behind and I didn't notice
Until my entire chest seemed to die
I don't look in mirrors


I want cold climates
I want shirts and sweaters and jackets and things
To cover my chest

I have been looking for things to make me whole
Looking for a man to tell me that I'm complete
Even though I'm not
I wouldn't mind filling my life with people who could lie to me

I have been dating to find my daughter
I have been working to pretend like I would have been a good mother
I am incomplete
And the only person I really want can't be with me

I don't know how I live on this earth anymore
How to tell myself that with so much of it missing
I can still stand.

I'm tired of surviving.

Friday, November 14, 2014

My Memory

I have a memory like bullets on a Sunday morning

I can't get dressed

My memory is ill timed and relentless

Every painful touch of that knit scarf reminds me of how often my ring used to get tangled in it
Every dress is not clothing but a date
A conversation
Holding my hand
Reminds me that I knew what it was like to feel safe
Even for a moment before I threw my dreams away
I am haunted my the feels of my fabric

I told myself that love and security are not the same thing
But I can't for the life of me remember why I believed one to be better

I can't find anything in my life that I want more than what I gave up
And for that I have all my options
And can't for the life of me manage to do anything

My memory is shards of class on the highway
It is chaos and broken and in a million pieces yet they are still all there
Waiting for ill timing to cut me
They are the fragmented voice in my head
They are the reminder that I now know it is like to feel

... Regret

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Best Thing

I am afraid of my room

Afraid of my bed

Exhausted but afraid that if I lay down I won't sleep but think
With nothing to distract my mind
I'll lay wondering what I've done
What I've given up
If the day will ever come when I don't choose to run

I'm exhausted but even when I sleep there is no rest to be found
My feet are dragging
And I am reaching for anything to distract me from thinking ...

That you might have actually been the best thing that ever happened to me

Sunday, November 2, 2014

War

The closest I've ever been to war
Is the cushioned seat of a movie theatre
The comfort of my own bed
The why can't we have peace mentality in the middle of a hostile world

I don't know what it's like to hope for peace
To literally save my life
Hanging onto every breath of a man in a suit
Putting people's lives down with a pen
I don't know

I've watched clips of soldiers with whiskey and cigarettes
Felt sympathy for women passed around like consolation prizes
To dead men

I am naive
Numb to the death around me
Consumed with my own feelings
So caught up in my own lack of peace
That sometimes I feel like I also might by dying
Feel like God put on a suit today
And placed my life at the end of a ink pen

I understand what it's like to reach outside myself for comfort
To find moments of forgetfullness in whiskey and cigarettes
To not care how many people have been with the person in my bed
Because it's a few moments outside my mind
A minute of the closest thing to peace I can find

There is war going on in my mind
Blinding me to life
To the happiness I knew
To having felt protected from the bombs

I need a third chance
A truce
A fortress from my weary mind

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Liar

Your eyes were introduced to mine as lairs

They were the bed of a committed lover
And I was the other woman

Your eyes reminded me to keep my distance
To not get involved in their bullshit

I knew that outside our weekends those eyes were lovingly looking at another woman
You have the eyes of a liar
Introduced to mine as a disappointing father
And for so long your eyes were the worst mistake of my life

But now I know that in a way they look just like mine

I know why you can't find the truth in my eyes

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Halloween

It's the onto night of the year that everyone's in my costume but me 

I've mourned more than one life that night 
Caught the wind of what could have been 
And when they walked in on me I deflected off the masks 
Told them that like everyone else tonight 
I am pretending 

Myself

I hid my flaws under furniture
And I hoped you would move in before you found them

I painted the pictures on our walls
I called them my life
And asked you only to see the brightness

I took myself
Covered the little girl with makeup
And I put my bet on the fact that you'd never wonder why I don't take it off

I called myself Christian and pagen in the same sentence
And I knew you were too in love to point it out

I've known lovers
And future husbands but they never embody the same person

I put myself on opposite sides of the room
And let you think you were insane when you wondered
Why you can ever seem to hold all of me

I am too old for my age
I'm too young for my life

I've made people pick teams and play tug of war with my arms
And then sat around
In the middle of the night wondering why I'm almost in two perfect halves
And for all of my accomplishments
I don't who I'm becoming

I lost myself in planning for the next thing

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Diamond

I wish I'd known the weight of a diamond 
The distraction of the way it winks at me so flirtatiously as I go about my day 

I wish I'd known the cost of a different life 
A love 

14 grams of gold and I've been walking sideways 
And Im too young to be so tired 
Too smart to give away my time 
Too selfish to have a love of my life 
And too dumb to understand 
The weight of a diamond 

Monday, September 29, 2014

Remember

I have to remember to look at you

As a person
And less of a window

Now and not three years ago

I'm going to remember to look at you

To see your skin as your own and not next to mine
Not on a child with half of your chromosomes and the paleness of mine

I'll try not to be disillusioned by the feel of your hands

I'm going to look at you
To look at you
I'm looking at you
And not through you...

Not following the strings of all the ways I've known you right into the past

Where everything smells of baby powder, and lonliness, and freightening new dreams

I am telling myself that if I love you it's for the flesh in front of me
Not for being half of the love of my life...
I grab your flesh to remind myself that you are human and flesh and now

I remember
I remember your eyes
Only because I prepared myself to look at them everyday
To send them to preschool
To send them to daycare
To rock them to sleep
I remember your eyes



Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Demon

She told me someone would have to cast out this demon
Apparently the same way they did from her the first time someone touched that little girl and she realized what shame feels like when it's not yours to carry but sits with you and picks at you all the same...

She said it's not me and not him and there's nothing to be done
Except cast out the demon

And I wanted to ask her what the demons name was
Statutory rape?
Home wrecker?
Can't beat them off with a stick?

But even under her Sunday school clothes I could see that she was too fragile for my off color jokes so I didn't ask.

She said,
"It's not what you look like or what you say or even what you do, it's the demon."

A Christianish justification for the first man who unfastened her pants and the next and the next and...

She said its a demon

I wanted to ask...
Is the demon in his early 40's because that's the age most the men who listen seem to be and I'm just trying to make sense of this...?

I was 12, at camp, and she said it's a demon that draws married men to you.

Then as politely as possible, I told her to fuck off.

I hope her justification still holds up.

Honestly

I used to write

But I'm afraid of the page
Of the truth
That maybe if I spell it out it won't look right
And I won't know to do with that...

Because honesty has always looked more clear in black and white
And I'm afraid