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By Misti Date: 2004 Oct 18 Comment on this Work [[2004.10.18.15.15.5406]] |
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I've read so much poetry to you. In bed, over the phone, while you bathed...Sandra Cisneros, Charles Bukowski, Ntozake Shange, Iris Berry. Mine. I have read and you have listened and thanked me for sharing. Before, in the beginning, we had candles and Jack Daniels and "Blood on the Tracks" and not much else. I felt brave and alive and sexy and worth a lot. I felt the way every woman should feel at least once in her life. You gave me roses. Told me I was the most incredible woman you've ever known. I almost believed you. But I have crazy hair and crazier ideas and more baggage than any airplane should ever allow...how could you love me, really? Truly and deeply...how really and truly and deeply can you love someone so crazy and flawed and damaged and tragic? I am Ophelia if she had lived, maybe. I am Sylvia Plath if she had chosen not to stick her head in the oven. Anne Sexton without the garage. I have lived on. Oh, I have lived on. I am ancient, darling. I am a crone crooning lullabies in your ear. This morning you hurt me again. Just a few words, a few tense moments. Will I let you hurt me again and again and again? How much will I allow? A couple of nights ago I looked at you and felt sorry for you because I didn't feel much of anything at all. Last night I watched you and I ached because I felt so much love I knew I could never leave. I am defeated before I start. I am still crying and my tears are getting cheaper with each passing year. I don't need to cry over dead Iraqis and the dead slaves and Indians in Howard Zinn's book. I don't need to cry over Bob Dylan songs and old love letters and a birch tree in the backyard with yellow leaves. I don't need to cry at all. There is no comforter. I am learning that there is no comforter and the truth is...there is no God in no Heaven collecting all my tears in glass bottles. I am witness to this shit, my life. Other people can only guess. They will never know the depth, the sacrifice, the insane length of the seconds. How bloated my life is. They will read my poems and maybe feel a tiny trickling but no, they will never know the raging ocean I fight to survive daily. Should I thank you now for the atolls you provide, for the island paradise that once was, for the ship you almost sailed that almost saved my life? Maybe I should thank you for that and a whole lot more but at this point I am too strangled and salty to speak. |