She had to forget about every love song she had ever heard. They were all written by men anyway – about how misunderstood they are and how the right woman could save them and how that was only you – only you understood the real him. Johnny Lee was wrong – just because you heard it in a lo-ove song doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong. In fact, it likely was.
As she went through her day, doing laundry, writing, grading papers, she tried to drown out all of those infernal, misleading lyrics combined with pictures of him and the sound of his laughing voice or his apologies ringing in her ears. All of those were lies. Maybe not intentional lies, but they were certainly not truths to be believed, that much was certain.
The fact that she was still in this relationship at all made her feel worthless and stupid. Stupid most of all. How many other women had she worked with and counseled? She of all people should have known better and here she was falling for all of the apologies that all of the abusive men had been making for decades (since it was only in the past few decades that this was even thought of as abuse) and she had been listening to them for years – since the very beginning of the relationship. What was wrong with her? Why had she put up with this all these years?
She couldn’t bear to admit it to herself – was it because he was one of the few men she had liked and approached that has reciprocated? The first blush of a new relationship had stayed, maybe even been renewed through the constant pattern of fighting and making up. It was as if she had met him all over every time he apologized and was tender. She was embarrassed to think that she had been just as stupid, just as fooled as all those women before her.
Or maybe it was her black and white way of thinking. When she had worked with abused women, she saw only the bruises, the fighting man, not realizing that there had been reasons that the women had fallen in love with the men in the first place and that it was those traits the women saw in the men, just as she had seen his vulnerable, tender side all these years – had seen and even shared in his dreams. She had to let his desires for a new life go, perhaps even more than her own. She laid down her head and cried.
She was not going to see their every moment together as a lie. That kind of denial would not serve her well. But she was going to try not to be taken in anymore. I have loved you and will be glad for that.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Saturday, May 03, 2014
Thursday, July 19, 2012
I felt briefly sad this morning, set aside my anger as I imagined you afraid. Remembered when you called every minute, we couldn’t get enough of each other. It’s sad not to love you anymore.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
Friday, July 06, 2012
The dark side of love (a journal entry)
He never forgave me for falling in love with him.
I exist [am allowed] in his domain to adore him. But not too much. And I when I fail to adore him, he becomes angry with me. And when I look at him too closely, smile too much, he says things to put me in my place, to make sure I know that I will never be enough for him, that I do not deserve his attention. He is never not angry with me. Not really.
When he hurts me I want to be raped.
To be pushed into a corner, grabbed, bent over a wall.
I know all of the psychobabble and all of the different explanations about helplessness, about the external manifestation of how I feel inside. To analyze it, reduce it to a talk show or cosmo cover would turn it into a cliche. I could pay someone by the hour to ask me the right questions to extract the exact reasons so I can get better but it won’t make him stop. The releases, the feel of rough hands, focused only on the moment, out of my control, pushed farther into dark feelings than I can take myself.
I exist [am allowed] in his domain to adore him. But not too much. And I when I fail to adore him, he becomes angry with me. And when I look at him too closely, smile too much, he says things to put me in my place, to make sure I know that I will never be enough for him, that I do not deserve his attention. He is never not angry with me. Not really.
When he hurts me I want to be raped.
To be pushed into a corner, grabbed, bent over a wall.
I know all of the psychobabble and all of the different explanations about helplessness, about the external manifestation of how I feel inside. To analyze it, reduce it to a talk show or cosmo cover would turn it into a cliche. I could pay someone by the hour to ask me the right questions to extract the exact reasons so I can get better but it won’t make him stop. The releases, the feel of rough hands, focused only on the moment, out of my control, pushed farther into dark feelings than I can take myself.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Life, Only Better
This was something I found in a journal that I had written a few years ago and found recently. This will be my last post for a while. I would love to know what you think.
Life, Only Better
(Tentative title for now)
Sometimes I need to just look out the window and think.
Sometimes I need to write something down and not develop it with examples, anecdotes, lists in 3s, with a thesis and a conclusion.
The thing about writers is that they can’t just have a thought. Everything has to become something. Thought is pressure to write. Not writing is guilt. Blasphemy. Squandered. What if the words (The Word) never comes back? What if in the course of remembering and recording you lose the beautiful phrase? Does the composer lose the melody sitting at the piano thye way I drop words at the keyboard? Is it not enough to have one thought? one beautiful moment? Must every note lead to a symphony, an opus? Each word the voice of a single angel raised to a cacophony?
“The problem with being a genius is that you spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing.” --Gertrude Stein
A year ago I was looking for you.
I don’t want to write a whole book about you. My life is not a book. Too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.
My mind is not a book.
No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better”. Only anal retentives think that.
I want to write and live movie trailers, with all the good stuff pulled into split-second cutaways, glimpses of the beautiful, explosions, and a great soundtrack.
And here you are.
I was wandering the streets in the snow wondering your name.
Every day I wait for you to leave.
I wanted you to make me feel better. To love you . . . was going to make me better.
Curving back on itself . . . what is the term? Concave? Elliptical? In the story it always curves back on itself, ties everything together even when it looked like nothing fit.
Novels imply there’s a grand design to life, a plan, a plot, a logic, an author.
A reason.
I am more random than that.
Switching from story to living (life) changes the words the cadence the way you live them the experience of your palate. Do you write to live on your mind or do you write to say things outloud?
Do you want to be read or to be heard? Do you write to say everything at once, or do you write to focus?
I thought of you as a reader.
The cafe is an oasis from life. Here is the desert island you are stranded on with only 3 possessions, only the items in your purse . . . a desert island with music and tv and sofas and lattes. But only a bit of yourself.
People resent artists for wanting what they themselves are not allowed to have either.
I envy the mad addicts, so lost in themselves that they have no room for the details of daily life, have faith that their muse will provide and someone will look out for them. I with no siblings, no dowry, no spouse, must fend for myself, straddling, required to feed myself, keep a roof over my own head in a world that is increasingly harsh, that gives no quarter to those who are different, those who desire anything more than the creature comforts craved by those who resent me. My wants are not so different--a roof over my head, money for going out, a doctor when I am sick, the occasional trip to see friends or family, to be be inspired by a new city. But the audacity of expecting such things in return for my mere art, my innermost, without sanction for my labor, a CEO to sign my check, an incorporation to keep the books . . .
Nothing in my home is fixed until it affects someone else.
When the war comes I will be free of responsibility, when the creditor/landlord/collector finally has other concerns.
Is there an understanding that never fades? Even Dresden was rebuilt. The shadows of Nagasaki are monuments now. Art. Memory. Museum. All knowledge becomes memory eventually.
How will I become a stranger for 40 days?
On Tuesdays the Somalian women go to English class. They get on the bus bringing with them the smell of Sandalwood.
On Tuesday I get on the bus with my hair wild, disoriented after a night of poetry and war reports.
You make me want to write
you make me want to write
you down.
I could never write on the bus. Not because of motion sickness, but because I cannot stop looking out the window, watching moments pass and time pass in marvels. Once I was [there] and now I am [here], minutes across a city, hours across a state/country/continent.
It’s sad when you can’t [don’t][don’t want to] love someone anymore. When you feel sorry to remember. Now that the daydream is over, this is not your story anymore. It’s just something I’ve written
remembered
lived
and I watch for you at the window mechanically, without desire
Miss you with annoyance
One year later, like always, I sit in the cafe watching for you outside the window. I have your phone number committed to memory [permission to speak] have seen your house walked your dog hugged your lover. I try to remember your mysteries. What it was to want you.
Anticipation.
Familiar.
Like always I watch for you.
I forget what it was to be strange
etranger
(e)strange(d)
What is the shelf-life of grief?
Anniversaries give us permission.
You are a conversation with myself.
I wrote you a letter by committee.
Is God a narcissist? to require us to love him?
Maybe god’s infinity comes from us. If god is love, and that love is unrequited, does god become finite, diminish? in existentialism, maybe god is not really dead, just burning himself up like the sun. Love is finite only when nothing comes back to you in return. It makes you stingy.
Unrequited love’s a bore--Jack Kerouac
At one I time I wanted to give you things. Take you places. Show you.
At one time.
Which is to say, not anymore.
Life, Only Better
(Tentative title for now)
Sometimes I need to just look out the window and think.
Sometimes I need to write something down and not develop it with examples, anecdotes, lists in 3s, with a thesis and a conclusion.
The thing about writers is that they can’t just have a thought. Everything has to become something. Thought is pressure to write. Not writing is guilt. Blasphemy. Squandered. What if the words (The Word) never comes back? What if in the course of remembering and recording you lose the beautiful phrase? Does the composer lose the melody sitting at the piano thye way I drop words at the keyboard? Is it not enough to have one thought? one beautiful moment? Must every note lead to a symphony, an opus? Each word the voice of a single angel raised to a cacophony?
“The problem with being a genius is that you spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing.” --Gertrude Stein
A year ago I was looking for you.
I don’t want to write a whole book about you. My life is not a book. Too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.
My mind is not a book.
No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better”. Only anal retentives think that.
I want to write and live movie trailers, with all the good stuff pulled into split-second cutaways, glimpses of the beautiful, explosions, and a great soundtrack.
And here you are.
I was wandering the streets in the snow wondering your name.
Every day I wait for you to leave.
I wanted you to make me feel better. To love you . . . was going to make me better.
Curving back on itself . . . what is the term? Concave? Elliptical? In the story it always curves back on itself, ties everything together even when it looked like nothing fit.
Novels imply there’s a grand design to life, a plan, a plot, a logic, an author.
A reason.
I am more random than that.
Switching from story to living (life) changes the words the cadence the way you live them the experience of your palate. Do you write to live on your mind or do you write to say things outloud?
Do you want to be read or to be heard? Do you write to say everything at once, or do you write to focus?
I thought of you as a reader.
The cafe is an oasis from life. Here is the desert island you are stranded on with only 3 possessions, only the items in your purse . . . a desert island with music and tv and sofas and lattes. But only a bit of yourself.
People resent artists for wanting what they themselves are not allowed to have either.
I envy the mad addicts, so lost in themselves that they have no room for the details of daily life, have faith that their muse will provide and someone will look out for them. I with no siblings, no dowry, no spouse, must fend for myself, straddling, required to feed myself, keep a roof over my own head in a world that is increasingly harsh, that gives no quarter to those who are different, those who desire anything more than the creature comforts craved by those who resent me. My wants are not so different--a roof over my head, money for going out, a doctor when I am sick, the occasional trip to see friends or family, to be be inspired by a new city. But the audacity of expecting such things in return for my mere art, my innermost, without sanction for my labor, a CEO to sign my check, an incorporation to keep the books . . .
Nothing in my home is fixed until it affects someone else.
When the war comes I will be free of responsibility, when the creditor/landlord/collector finally has other concerns.
Is there an understanding that never fades? Even Dresden was rebuilt. The shadows of Nagasaki are monuments now. Art. Memory. Museum. All knowledge becomes memory eventually.
How will I become a stranger for 40 days?
On Tuesdays the Somalian women go to English class. They get on the bus bringing with them the smell of Sandalwood.
On Tuesday I get on the bus with my hair wild, disoriented after a night of poetry and war reports.
You make me want to write
you make me want to write
you down.
I could never write on the bus. Not because of motion sickness, but because I cannot stop looking out the window, watching moments pass and time pass in marvels. Once I was [there] and now I am [here], minutes across a city, hours across a state/country/continent.
It’s sad when you can’t [don’t][don’t want to] love someone anymore. When you feel sorry to remember. Now that the daydream is over, this is not your story anymore. It’s just something I’ve written
remembered
lived
and I watch for you at the window mechanically, without desire
Miss you with annoyance
One year later, like always, I sit in the cafe watching for you outside the window. I have your phone number committed to memory [permission to speak] have seen your house walked your dog hugged your lover. I try to remember your mysteries. What it was to want you.
Anticipation.
Familiar.
Like always I watch for you.
I forget what it was to be strange
etranger
(e)strange(d)
What is the shelf-life of grief?
Anniversaries give us permission.
You are a conversation with myself.
I wrote you a letter by committee.
Is God a narcissist? to require us to love him?
Maybe god’s infinity comes from us. If god is love, and that love is unrequited, does god become finite, diminish? in existentialism, maybe god is not really dead, just burning himself up like the sun. Love is finite only when nothing comes back to you in return. It makes you stingy.
Unrequited love’s a bore--Jack Kerouac
At one I time I wanted to give you things. Take you places. Show you.
At one time.
Which is to say, not anymore.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Untitled first draft of an old poem
some poetry is not meant
to change the world but
to be
a mash note a lover’s breath something
that would otherwise go unsaid a touch that would
otherwise go unfelt there are moments
that everything is changed. i’m struggling to
keep equilibrium my thoughts
break like bad poetry my heart beats a little too fast
strains like it wants to burst out like it might die
so exquisitely one last bang and then a stop but i know
it’s not like that yet. everything feels changed. i’m not ready. this poem
will not change the world any consciousness
except between you and me is not
to be published read shared remembered is not posterity
is only a string (of words) between your heart and mine a memory
the morning your hands your lips on my neck your hands on my skin
the reach between my legs and on the road everything
changes i don’t know if you feel it scares me to not know
the memory burns my body remembers and it’s stubborn it gets
stuck remembers you desires nothing
else won’t let me know burns remembering where your hands
were burns in my breasts my skin makes me remember everything
distracts me when i walk embarrasses me when i talk
to others when i talk to you struggle to listen over the talking of my body.
transcend. i know you want to transcend. my body wants to hold you in place
out of time to live in memory stop everything
is changing.
to change the world but
to be
a mash note a lover’s breath something
that would otherwise go unsaid a touch that would
otherwise go unfelt there are moments
that everything is changed. i’m struggling to
keep equilibrium my thoughts
break like bad poetry my heart beats a little too fast
strains like it wants to burst out like it might die
so exquisitely one last bang and then a stop but i know
it’s not like that yet. everything feels changed. i’m not ready. this poem
will not change the world any consciousness
except between you and me is not
to be published read shared remembered is not posterity
is only a string (of words) between your heart and mine a memory
the morning your hands your lips on my neck your hands on my skin
the reach between my legs and on the road everything
changes i don’t know if you feel it scares me to not know
the memory burns my body remembers and it’s stubborn it gets
stuck remembers you desires nothing
else won’t let me know burns remembering where your hands
were burns in my breasts my skin makes me remember everything
distracts me when i walk embarrasses me when i talk
to others when i talk to you struggle to listen over the talking of my body.
transcend. i know you want to transcend. my body wants to hold you in place
out of time to live in memory stop everything
is changing.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
you and the world
The longer we're together (I'm with you)
the harder it is to say goodbye
the lingering imprints of your hands
fingers (fingertips)
vibration lingers on my lips
Today a woman assassinated
Benazir Bhutto is dead
and I feel my vulnerable woman's parts
more than ever
what it is in me that longs for all things
that wants more of you than I can take (handle)
I feel how easily all is
corrupted
and the world
I am jolted from forced
back inside
into hiding perhaps in my
self or outside an exile
perhaps I
move slowly my heart
is (beats) ir
reg u lar(ly) perhaps a bubble
all things already
said in these moments uncertain wordless without courage
My stare steady silent perhaps
vacant but not blank
inside it's you only
I see feel phantom fingertips left
yesterday six months past september summer
there was power
hope -----inadequate-----magic half
conjurations a spell in my hand
an imperfect sister is dead
and I want
to live my power in the world
and you.
the harder it is to say goodbye
the lingering imprints of your hands
fingers (fingertips)
vibration lingers on my lips
Today a woman assassinated
Benazir Bhutto is dead
and I feel my vulnerable woman's parts
more than ever
what it is in me that longs for all things
that wants more of you than I can take (handle)
I feel how easily all is
corrupted
and the world
I am jolted from forced
back inside
into hiding perhaps in my
self or outside an exile
perhaps I
move slowly my heart
is (beats) ir
reg u lar(ly) perhaps a bubble
all things already
said in these moments uncertain wordless without courage
My stare steady silent perhaps
vacant but not blank
inside it's you only
I see feel phantom fingertips left
yesterday six months past september summer
there was power
hope -----inadequate-----magic half
conjurations a spell in my hand
an imperfect sister is dead
and I want
to live my power in the world
and you.
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