Walking isn’t peaceful anymore. Each step is a syllable marching forward through some remembered story. It feels like an addiction, this retelling. It’s how I feel when someone describes a particularly flavorful beer or a perfectly balanced whiskey. After months of blissful indifference I want it, suddenly and immediately, transfused and coursing through my veins. Even though I know, I know, that it will pull me apart me from the inside out, chomping at the liver and love I’ve been working so hard to heal.
step, step, step.
In these old stories I am a cursed villain or a stumbling idiot. A naive child or a crook caught red-handed. In more than one, the village laughs with mocking disdain that I, mistakenly, take for sincere glee.
ha, ha, ha.
It is not until later, until the inevitable dissection, that I realize my error.
My ignorance and my mistakes—they are the things I wish to flush from my system. But the toxic slurry of loathing I am pumping in to take its place kills indiscriminately. It might rid me of my shame, but is it worth my softness?
Regardless,
for fear of waking Memory, I tread lightly.
poetry
what to call it, besides the obvious
To say that we were young, dumb, and unprepared
Is to wave away a cobweb
Once an intricate tangle of emotion, religion, attachment,
now a dusty remnant in the corner.
Though let’s not overcomplicate it.
We were young and dumb and unprepared.
I was the victim, with natural desires, and insecurities: human.
I was the villain, with wordless expectations and an unfathomable well of resentment: monster.
I can be every character in the story, says my memory.
And you can choose whatever corrugated cutout you desire
to sit across from me as I chug another beer
and try to blur your scissored edges into flesh
as dinner gets cold, again.
But what can a drowning person do, if they never learned to swim?
Good intentions are not as buoyant as they seem.
I was suffocating in our small-town, thoughts-and-prayers, believers-in-Normal bubble.
I was tired of filling the shoes of a woman you didn’t know how to grieve.
I was twisted up too tightly, wrapped in the sheets of my unchecked mind, never having learned how to sleep in the bed by myself and suddenly thrust into it all with a stranger.
What can a drowning person do, if they never learned to swim?
Truthfully, I didn’t know there was a way to just float.
Always treading, moving, hiding, shifting
It’s addictive, until it isn’t.
We were the victims,
and the villains.
And I promise, I’ve moved on.
But you know how sometimes you look down and see that one scar that’s lingered after all this time? That one that still causes you think back and wonder what the lesson was?
You are that to me.
Unsolicited
You sliced through my skin
and injected your venom into
the red waters of my body.
Like roots thirsting
it was sucked up hungrily
transported, dispersed
It lingers still
To get feedback of what they think of you
Perhaps I shouldn’t have listened
But then, I never asked.
legacy
Is greatness carved
from the desire for greatness?
Contained within some weighty block,
neither eager nor patient, obstinately set.
Is it cobbled and collaged,
years of sediment mounting and pressing
slowly amassing to some requisite threshold
Is it birthed as if from nothing,
emerging in an ostentatious flare,
the product of greater forces, shifting
What I’m really asking is,
should I flit between the flowers
and lie amongst the grass
while I still can?
(sept. 2022)
dissociation
Consciousness peeling away from my body like sunburned skin;
Like dried glue and fidgety fingers, nervous from thoughts of what is to come
The crash of glasses and you,
Dinner simmering with a cloud of steam fogging the glass – an eyelid closing.
The walls that once felt drafty, now impenetrable.
There’s no use knocking now.
(09.12.22)
. . .
I had this feeling earlier today—at the thought of a memory, or an imagination—of my essence pulling away from myself, separating, hiding, floating, leaving. Watching this dissociation, this image of peeling apart came to me. This sensation I’ve felt many times, of being apart from my body when being in it is too much to handle.
I couldn’t decide, was this the feeling of splitting apart two things made of sameness, or removing a foreign substance from some base existence?
Then I couldn’t help but think of the nervous fidgeting that often pairs with these situations, in the waiting for the next time.
In the moments when a place with ways to see out and in, body and home, becomes foggy and clouded. Claustrophobic traps, hidden. Where no one can see your tears. Where outside hope feels unreachable and the promises beyond the glass, gone.
. . .
surface // the fiction of my flesh
You’re reading my body
The stories of my scars and the writing of my wrinkles
But what does my skin say of the longing in my soul and the aching of my heart
If the tears carved canyons in my cheeks, how deep would they be? Would you climb them?
If the darkened cavern of my skull was filled with black ink swirling, would it be big enough for two?
(09.05.22)
reminders
sidewalk chalk, smudged
a van like his
The trees with severed limbs
still sending sap
to parts no longer there.
The sweetness clumps at the edges,
it can’t turn back.
The leaves fall like rain —
the sound of forgetting,
drowned by the hum of cicadas.
The scent of summer lingers,
I plug my nose and return home.
(09.05.22)
an unplanned saturday
Today contains a yearning
and no balm to soothe it
The harsh light on this walk makes me feel lumpy;
the twice-stubbed toe, fumbling.
A tree covered with leaves like fans,
the intricacy of the patterns of the bark,
and the gentle breeze
almost overtook the moist oppressive heat
and the tree swing locked behind
the fence with gaps just large enough for glimpses.
Almost.
A snake slithered beneath the brush.
Does it know its tail still lingers on the sidewalk?
A child playing hide-and-seek
and a woman all too happy to play along
as they hide in plain sight.
Oh, to be so easily found.
The walk is over and I try another route
But as my eyes skim the final words
of a book both beautiful and sad
there is revealed yet another emptiness
looking up at me with hollow eyes
and open mouth.
I try another route
the pleasure ripples through my body
and a moan escapes.
I open my eyes,
eager,
but the dopamine dissipates
and the bed beside me
is an empty yawning chasm.
Today the sun is a bully,
harsh and taunting,
and the seduction of shopping,
with its a/c and endless supply of stuff
becomes all too alluring
as I sit in my indecision
unsure of what next to throw
into this insatiable hunger.
The emptiness rumbling within me
threatens like a thunderstorm,
a coiled tension with no release,
no balm to soothe it.
(August 2022)
To Wander
To write straightforwardly,
comprehensibly,
is to know what it is you want to say
and that you want to say it.
We walk the circuitous path when
we don’t know where we are going,
how to get there,
or if we are
ready
ready
to finish our walk
go inside
and say those things
we’ve been dreading.
(09.03.22)
A Song
That song you said you hated
I’m listening to it on repeat.
When you told me your opinion
I stayed
what I thought to be suspiciously
silent
If you hate something I love
I feared
maybe we’re not as compatible
as I thought
Though what’s a song,
really,
compared to the rest.
Just
poetic sound
wrapped in emotion
mined from the soul
and shared on the waves
As light as air
As heavy as my heart
As meaningful as worrying
about our compatibility
apparently
(09.02.22)
abstract relations vi 