He says to me, we have a lot of work here: we need to get you off this cross you’ve put and nailed yourself upon. This cross that you’ve also built.
And I laugh again inappropriately because the image fits: I’ve trapped myself, this is all my doing. But the image is wrong as well: I am no martyr, just the torturer and the tortured, the instrument and the pain.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
everything else just bruised
we see the color all red and something in the vein, like pouring, like a match just lit or exhausted, the ember of it. two times i’ve stumbled across feet as large as bricks and only my own, scarred and calloused palms that did nothing to stop the falling only deflect my teeth from smashing against the concrete. she says to me, that’s why your smile is so beautiful, everything else is just bruised.
break everything
by the pond, he kneels, rubs his hands into the mud, it’s all mud, he says, it’s all become fucking mud. i can’t separate the dirt from the water, the pebble from the glass.
he bows his head, heaves, i can’t tell the difference, he says, between the spring and the fall, the crush of death and the passion of love, the light of the moon and the warmth of the sun.
he chokes, digs his nails into his scalp, i can’t tell the difference between the pain and the sorrow, the torturer and the torment, the prisoner and the cell.
i break everything, he whispers, i break everything.
can't or won't
He leaves me rattling: the difference between can’t and won’t. He asks me specifically, why not this, why not finish your dissertation? I volunteer the connection to my father, my propensity to abandon things I’ve started. He circles back again: can’t or won’t? He tells me of how he too didn’t finish his dissertation at first but found something that pushed him on, an approach, a field, but he finished and was outraged when he was questioned during his orals. He points out it might never be too late. And I find it difficult to wrap my mind around it, it’s been well over seven years, the field has changed. Besides I am this now, their lives depend on me being this now. He leaves me with can’t or won’t, sounds to me like you’re just bored.
charged
Extraction requires excavation, a digging through the flesh to come up with bones. It’s a mess in there. The little one says, I want us to put up halloween decorations like a family. She asks, are we irreparable? My son struggles against my touch. My mother hounds me about my isolation. My father tries. And I am left feeling selfish and alone, gripping the steering wheel through one song after another, charging into the night, heaving and sobbing and barely able to see.
(dis)solution
No one will tell me what I already don’t now: I’ve heard it all before, it’s run through my mind a million times. Every angle, every tangent, well worn and dull: I am an animal, I am wounded, I am broken, I do not know how to heal, I’ve never known how to be. Mr self destruct, mr incomplete, mr apathy, jigsaw and irregular, spend hours and nothing fits. I cannot cope, I cannot believe, and I need an end that no one can provide, there is no miracle drug, there is no right word, no password to crack this code, no peace that is real. It is all in the imagination, it’s all been laid out and explained and found lacking.
thirst
Truest alone happiest alone at peace alone scotch and ginger ale square in front of me all that I am all that I could be within that amber breath in the bubbles within the chill of the ice the warmth in the gullet as I swallow this is all that you were meant to be not poet not writer not philosopher not father not lover not husband not real-just a man lost in the glass in front of him, just the drink that barely keeps up with an unquenchable thirst
faith healing
She cuddles up to me in the night, the first time in days and whispers, but I want more. My daughter asks me to keep her warm and I bundle her up, tuck the blanket beneath her feet, hold her tightly while my son all of one stumbles about the house, plops his head on my belly. He then goes bumbling off again. When does it end? When does sorrow and remorse give way to mercy and grace? When does despair finally, resolutely dissolve before faith?
pendulum
Asking for permission, permission to breathe, permission to weep, permission to love, permission to beg, permission to forgive. Of all the crimes and sins, perhaps the most sacrilegious request of all: to forgive and to be forgiven. No solace, only long empty days and terrible nights. I find myself aching, bent over double but I will not kneel to him, I cannot forgive him, he is everything wrong with this life, just the simple fact that he still lives.
a simple freedom
When will i ever be happy again? When will I ever be present? When will I feel something other than remorse, regret, sorrow and numbness? It is not stupidly enough a matter of changing scenery: things would only get worse without some sort of stability, some sort of structure. But I feel as if I am pretending and increasingly find it difficult to live with myself: I am hurting everyone, I am cold and broken. I do not want to die but I also do not want to continually put the people that love me in this predicament. The therapist had said to me just as I was leaving: it is a terrible thing to feel like you’re second rate; it most suck some of the pleasure out of your life if not all of it.
When will I be free of myself?