Tag: relationships

Posted on

It’s What You want (Poem 20 of the Poetry Marathon)


Never enough of it because the throngs crash into me

When all I want to do is get to the other side of the street.

And the rare time I sit down to watch a movie or t.v.,

There’s the dog’s head or tail blocking the screen.

So I call her over to me, and in 90 degree heat, she,

Whose heredity traces back to Alaska, lies against me.
 

Relationships, the worst for the coveted thing since

no matter how hard you try, you can’t get him off,

To let go and do something on his own, without me.

I have a friend who’s a close talker, another who pokes,

And yet another who slaps me every time she laughs.

My mother was a hugger but even she could sense.
 

What is this prized possession we never have,

Well, not enough of, but we all need and want?

What’s her name? You thought she was beauty,

And you were wrong. Not money, nor fame, either.

Yes, family, marriage, children, some of us crave that,

But others could care less. No the thing is             Ah, yes.

 

Image Source

Posted on

The Editor


Image source

She said she doesn’t understand me.

Not my words, not my plans, not me.

She doesn’t understand me.

She said that, “I don’t understand you.”

She also said:

“You don’t use enough poetic words.”

“You’re unclear.”

“No one understands what you mean.”

“You say too much.”

“You leave nothing for the imagination.”

“There’re prettier ways to write that.”

“Your sentences are too long, too short,

Too convoluted, too simple, too complex,

Too awkward, too abstract, too concrete…”

And so much more she said. 

She gassed on about my description, my

Commas, periods, semi colons, dashes,

Especially the Oxford commas and italics.

She hates enjambment. 

She said it, “I hate enjambment. 

I prefer clean breaks.

People need to write plainly.

Go direct, 

Say what they mean.”

She likes rhymes or landscapes,

Not a lot of nihilism and death.

She prefers old verse to new,

Stanzas to trees, 

And blank verse to free.

Words flow too freely too often.

She repeats that.

Each time I see her, she repeats,

“Loose lips, and sticks and stones,

And penny for your thoughts.”

She likes the old ways, the olden days.

She doesn’t like my way.

My way is too dull, too lurid, too boring.

She said she honestly doesn’t know

Why I bother.

She doesn’t get it. 

Not me, not anything about me.

She doesn’t understand anything.

She doesn’t understand me.

I said that: “You don’t even know.” (Me)

Posted on

Saying Good-bye: Ten for Today

A deep melancholy weaves itself inside a house leaking in 

the first cool night of October. 

It shadows the shades with daylight endings 

with no thought to warmer, longer days. 

It’s a passing of sorts, the dying season. 

The year’s swan song in golden ochre and chestnut hurrahs.

 
Only this first cold day, a day where I search for socks 

in a squeaky disused drawer overflowing unmatched orphans, 

endings haunt the costumed furniture. 

Almost Halloween, though none know it’s Halloween inside. 

And only I know my mismatched socks stretch 

hodge-podge high up my booted shins.

 
These and many others are fall’s secrets, 

hidden under leaf piles and broken relationships. 

I’m sorry to see some go. I’m sorry. 

Only spring light may reveal a return on investing 

in you all these years, but only if you count it out– 

the season of us has dried up and gone. 

Posted on

Cant: Ten for Today


October 25, 2016

Not too many days left here. Other work picking up enough now. Enough for me to starve elsewhere same as here. But somewhere else is looking better now.

I told you that the other day, over lunch, staring over our spring salads cozily tossed over delicate sky blue rimmed plates dotted with balsamic splashes. Your eyes–barely hiding blood-shod heart hiding in muddy boots–stoned menace into radicchio and leeks. 

My own intrepid gaze, blazed red into radish rounds and scallions. We could hardly speak, abjuring conversation for the death of leaves, lies, us…

“Can I bring you anything else? Dessert?”

Each of us nodded to her, looking to her while acknowledging the thud of silence on the table that dared us not peek into each other’s musing. 

“I’m okay, thank you.”

You just smiled in assent. She curtly nodded and turned her heels to walk away. 

“I’m quitting.” 

Your head rose suddenly, alarm flooding your pupils, readying…

“I can’t work there any more. It’s too…just too… I’ve outgrown the place, nothing left there for me. I’m past the insecurity and fear of not finding another job. I need to strike out.”

Noticeably relieved, despite your impassive gaze, you waited for me to say more.

But I didn’t. 

Posted on

Fight or Flight: Guest Post by Liz at Infidelity Counseling Network

By Liz for ICN

10/4/16

 

 

Fight or Flight

 

 

Six years and one week ago, I overheard my husband on his cell phone. He was speaking to a woman. It was Tuesday.

 

I could feel and hear the blood pulsing through my neck. It was the sound of intense fear.

 

I thought to myself, this is it, I was right, that nagging thought for a while that there was someone else was true, I was not crazy.

 

When he had hung up, I went into his office, asking angrily who that was. He had some crazy answer, and I knew in that moment that despite how smart he was, at this, I was smarter than him. I knew I would find out, and SOON. I maintained my outward cool while inside was a total fight or flight response. I decided to gather information before a flight.

 

The next morning while he was showering for work, I quietly turned on his cell phone to check the call history. It had been cleared.

 

As soon as I’d gotten the kids off to school, I found some old cell phone records with a number that kept reappearing – a partial story. It took me four hours that morning that morning to register our phone bill online, download the call history, google some of the repeating numbers, and identify the owner of the most frequently-called number. So I called it, and she said I had the wrong number. At lunchtime I called again and got her voicemail. Bingo. Her full name was on the outgoing message. Now I had the information I needed…but I still did not know if I was ready for a “fight” or for my flight.

 

I wanted then and there to throw him out, but we had kids, I did not want to divorce their father. We were a family. So there was to be no flight. At least not yet.

 

I waited till Saturday. That very morning, his affair partner had left him a cell phone message and I had listened to it. She was trying to be calm while things were tense, but she loved him and would wait until they could be together. I told him then that I knew about her, and he confessed, saying it was just a few times, it did not mean anything to him. But I had proof of months of calls and her declaration of love. I asked where they had sex; he gave me hotel names. I insisted he end it immediately, and even suggested how he could do it so as to keep her husband protected. I thought myself a better person for my compassion.

 

We went to couples counseling, and I kept saying I believed there were many women for many years, and he denied it all. I insisted on full transparency. It never came. Now there was no fight…he simply would not talk about it.

 

By now, poring over cell records and hotel bills, I was getting to be a first class Private Investigator which was making me crazy. I had been in fight-or- flight mode for over 5 weeks, anxious and barely eating or sleeping. I was paying with my mental health.

 

After a while, I began to feel I had lived a lie. Every family event and holiday over the past 6-7 years was marred by the knowledge that he’d called various women on all those dates. Nothing felt sacred anymore. The betrayal I felt was boundless. Every special moment was spoiled. I saw myself as damaged, duped, betrayed, angry, and resentful.

 

I focused on his choices, and all the times he could have chosen another path but did not. I focused self-righteously on all the good I had done for others when our own marriage was disappointing.

 

This constant feeling of fight-or-flight made me lose my compassion and objectivity. I become a person who tried to survive day by day. I was unaccustomed to being this self-centered, angry, suspicious, jealous, snooping, distrustful person, and I did not like this new me. I knew I had to find a way to the other side, to thrive again.

 

For two years I was a wreck, later telling people that I’d had a nervous breakdown. At his request, I told no one other than paid professionals. I isolated myself socially, did only what I had to do, and avoided people and places that would trigger what I deemed my PTSD. Since I knew many of his affair partners, and had to drive by many of the hotels in my daily rounds of work and kids, it was hard to avoid it all. I made myself crazier by compulsive snooping, and it never helped me a bit, never made me feel safer, never made the situation better, and just perpetuated a cycle of craziness for me.

 

Above all, I wanted to talk to other women who had been through this, but found none. If I had to do it all over again, I would have told a select few people because not having the support was so tough for me. Later, we separated, and I told a lot of people. They all judged him harshly. And I learned that once you give someone your story, you can never un-tell them…so be careful about whom you chose to hold your intimate history. I should have told only people whom I was sure would be there for me and not judgehim. Everyone has an opinion about she/he would do in this situation, but until I had been there, I realized there is no black and white answer…only lots and lots of gray.

 

Six years and one week later, I am stronger and wiser. Perhaps I am not the same trusting person, but the new me is one I finally like and which took years to accomplish. I felt so bad about myself for so long; if I’d been kinder to myself, if I’d been able to release myself from that intense fight-or-flight mode, my recovery might have been faster. But I accept now that I did what I felt I had to do. Now I am a good, kind, compassionate, and wiser person. I wish I could add “trusting” to that list, but that is still a work in progress.

 

 

By Liz

Volunteer at Infidelity Counseling Network

Get support to heal from infidelity – http://infidelitycounselingnetwork.org/counselor.html

Donate to help keep our services free for all women – http://infidelitycounselingnetwork.org/donate.html

 

 

 

 

Posted on

A Room: Poem 23

A room in this old house, holds history–
mine, yours ours and theirs.
This room is where I sleep nights;
it’s where I awaken each day to
slatted light from vertical blinds
that open to a window laden with
orange tree leaves and ripened
fruit, the color of the sun setting
on the Pacific not more than a mile
from this very room in this home.

Its cornflower blue walls contain
my thoughts and prayers, my
ujjayi breath, sometime despair.
This oaken floor steadies my
bare feet, wears my yoga mat,
including the cat on top who
skrick scratches her claws in it.

But it wasn’t always my cave;
it belonged to others before me.
Two nieces slept here, the last
who chose the wall colors, and
the one before who now sleeps
in my parents’ home, while they
sleep in mine now, in their room,
which used to be the play room
for loud television shows and toys
and kool aid colored couches for
friends to jump on and destroy.

And before that, it was the bedroom
my husband designed and had built
by a friend who charged too much and
stole his baby grand piano on pretext.
And before it was our bedroom, where
our children were conceived and I
labored in our big blue sunken jacuzzi
tub beneath the bay window and lime
stone tiles surrounding the midnight blue,
it was an office converted from a garage,
where his business began selling hardware,
which eventually turned to software and an
office elsewhere, which he sold to find
more fulfilling work, which he still seeks.

But when my parents moved in, we moved
the bed, desk, dresser, night table and lamps
into my room, the room I share with no one
except the dog, a few cats and the constant
turnstile traffic of inquirers and visitors living
in and outside the house, my room, the hub,
with its Picasso print of woman-dove face in
black and white, who resembles my oldest
daughter even though I bought that print
twenty years before her birth, and now that
she’s twenty herself, she tattooed that face
on her left arm, just like it appears on my
bedroom wall, above the hand painted
poster that asks, “Is there no way out of the
mind?”, purchased and overpriced by a
friend of my daughter’s who painted and
sold it to me after she returned from rehab.

And the Van Gogh with the gilt frame, huge
hanging above my bed, well that was a gift
from my nephew when he was only 23, and
he knew I loved art and so wrapped this big
old Starry Night print and gave it to me, so
that’s why it’s there framed above my head,
garish and cliché but sentimentally stationed.

Because my room holds pictures of my girls,
and a fan that cools me summers and a
heater that warms me winters, and dozens
of ceramic boxes and knick knacks and the
remains of my jewelry box, what wasn’t
stolen by someone who knew the dog
well enough not to get bitten as an intruder.

This room holds hours of frustration, and
ideas, poems and graded essays, years of
reading and writing, drawing, coloring and
crocheting, fretting and forgetting, crying
and laughing, the entire history of a house,
its inhabitants, furnishings, we call home.

Posted on

First Cut: Poem 15

First Cut–
 
Perhaps my father was the first,
 
with his absence,
 
except for the rare storms from his daytime slumber
 
to terrorize us into quiet so he could sleep.
 
I once got caught in the cross fire of his flying hands.
 
I was not yet 3.
 
My older sisters squealed and screamed him awake.
 
But I was too naive to run.
 
Before that, he was the myth my mother made us believe
 
about fatherhood and tender love.
 
First Cut II–
 
Another one I summons from memory caves
 
was the gorgeous boy
 
with the ass long shiny silk brown hair
 
and tan flawless skin sunk into Italian brown eyes.
 
I was 13 and he 15.
 
He paid me attention, walked with me at night
 
on a quiet moon-lit road named Candlewood as we
 
murmured our intentions, our future married selves
 
–or I did.
 
I couldn’t believe he was interested in me, a brainy
 
average-looking girl with the wrong kind of hair that refused
 
to hang long and straight from a middle combed part.
 
And a week after that walk under the old gibbous moon,
 
when I told him I wanted to marry a bodily lover,
 
he failed to appear, non-responsive, ghosted–
 
and I cried the cliché with a painful heart, torn
 
and scorned, never to be stabbed the same again,
 
my pillows my week-long companions in sob-town.
 
First Cuts–
 
Though others made Caesar of my heart, dagger
 
hurlers and stabbers, I remember them vaguely.
 
Not like the first cuts, the baptismal soul’s sarcophagus.

Posted on

Room of my own to clean: Ten for Today


August 21, 2016
 
Late summer cleaning: Decluttering my room brings me to well-traveled roads. Everything I touch feels or smells like time: last week, month, year or decade. My room aggregates time.
 
But not just this room. I’ve inhabited rooms all my life, fortunate as I am to have had roofs over my head. Only by choice have I slept outside a room–from camping under the stars, backpacking across the country or passed out drunk on a stranger’s couch.
 
My first room–one of my own–had tan shorn short carpet covered in down feathers slowly de-fluffed from my down comforter through small growing holes. I shared an apartment with my older sister after I left the home I shared with my husband for nearly 9 years. We were on hiatus. Six years of separation. And this room was the first I called my own, having shared all my other rooms from birth to age 29.
 
Though the circumstances of my landing in this room in an apartment complex settled below the hump of a freeway on ramp dampened the excitement of this first time experience, still I marveled at the possibilities: stamp my own identify into the fabric. Finally, I could fill a space with me, pieces of me in art, furnishings, bed sheets and comforters, knick knacks–all my choices.
 
As it turned out, however, I’d only half live in that space and the only addition to the bland, bare tan room, bed and dresser I unloaded moving in was the escaped goose down feather floor covering. Between obsessive work hours and mad dash dating, I hardly spent time in that room I slept in for two years before I bought a house, where I lived for another three or four years before moving back into my marital home, where now, 21 years later, I have my own room–sort of, mostly–to clean.

Posted on

There’s a Woman (Ten for Today)


August 2, 2016
 
I used to have so much fight in me, so much conviction, indignation, righteousness and determination. I was ambition. I was striving.
 
Now I’m heart-fatigued, deadened by weather, watches and people, so I can’t be bothered with so much of what bothered me. My ambitions are quieter, steadier now. And while before everything turned to anger–contradiction, injustice, oppression–now those conditions are met with a profound sadness that shatters my steady, moves my once immovable tears from the dammed up reservoir of hurt, pain, disappointment, fear, shock and panic to come, future furies and frustrations.
 
For example, I know someone who takes advantage of my inability to say no, sometimes. She plays me, and I know it and accept it. I allow her to do that–use me for her own gains and pleasures. I can only surmise I permit her to take advantage; otherwise, I would simply make her stop.
 
That slight, that injustice, that unfairness, how she treats me, would have enraged me in younger days. I would have ached to avenge my pride, my dignity, scraping my imagination with retorts, come-backs, equalizing actions and humiliating reconciliation.
 
But today, I observe her making me uncomfortable, forcing me to vocalize the dirty rotten truth between us. And I watch myself watching her watching me. Awaiting the courage and the words, I witness her machinations, manipulations and movements, and mull the situation over, slightly anxious, confident the solution will find me.

Posted on

Today’s Ten-Minute Write

I don’t know what I think until I write it down—Joan Didion

typewriter

In my web journeys today, I discovered a site called Life in 10 Minutes that collects and features ten-minute life writes. Much to my delight, this site celebrates what I do most days anyhow, write for ten minutes to a timer just to get a little heat to my brain and fingers, a warm-up if you will. After the free-write, I am ready to take on larger writing endeavors, like an essay or poem or whatever else that needs writing.

Though I have never thought of publishing these exercises in their entirety, taking only bits and pieces to flesh out into something grander, I might tinker with this idea of setting them out here as-is for a while to see what they bear.

I hope you enjoy today’s ten minutes of life.

June 27, 2016

Today feels like yesterday, except less fatigued and more awakened. My muscles after a half hour of yoga to start the day feel thick and rubbery like those industrial size rubber bands that bind a ream of paper’s worth of words—a manuscript, for example–together with firmness yet flexibility. My strut is glide-easy balanced between the push and pull of gravity.

And though the heat is slightly oppressive and my father is calling me on my cell phone once again from just inside the other side of the house, disrupting my writing—yet again, to ask me one of several questions he asks daily: “Are you hungry? What are we eating? Do you need anything from Sam’s? The answers to which are all 90 % of the time “No, I don’t know and no,” I sit in good-willed contentment and compassion. It is how he communicates, after all, how he crafts the world—plot, character and theme all food.

So today, with soft-hardness under the pads of my feet and surrounding the gooey gray matter inside my hard head, I have promised us both not to take it personally, not to react like night to day, inevitable and expected, even as nothing is ever guaranteed. I let the word “Dad” that flashes on my Samsung phone screen evoke a nanosecond of knee-jerk irritation before I exhale with the word ‘calm’ unformed but sunk-in performed. We will have this day of little perturbation, only small speed bumps that we will drive over slowly, braking down, deliberately pressing the gas pedal with a long whispered inhale and even longer exhale.

Blog at WordPress.com.