anniversary.
I noticed a strange red bump at the joint where my elbow is.
I noticed how his girlfriend is obnoxious, though loving, when she is drunk.
I noticed the vase that we used for the fourth of July picnic,
knocked over,
leaning
on a watering pail,
both left out on the patio table.
The vase’s water brown,
the flowers dried and bent,
just abandoned
even after their scent and color has faded.
Died.
A new visiting nurse came to check on my grandmother today. My grandma had trouble recalling what it was that had caused her back injury. I wondered if the nurse imagined that we were not taking good care of our grandmother. When the truth is that she had given up long ago, resigned to a life of stillness, similar to death but still breathing, still observing, like a ghost who hovers over the lives still growing and aches to be able to participate. Only she can. Or maybe she can’t. Maybe her body is spent and all there is is rest until the final rest.
It saddens me. No one can argue that living with someone so close to death is depressing.
She is a person whom I have come to know in the winter of her life. She is the woman who gave birth to my mother, who is responsible for partially shaping who my mother is today.
It is not surprising that my mother developed so much ambition. To escape.
Funny that I am mostly comfortable.
I’m not, totally, but
mostly.
There is this desire to be free. But what would I do? I would struggle more than I do now and probably create some level of drama for myself just to feel entertained.
When living here I am entertained by the drama of three generations of women, still all trying to figure out how to exist. How to coexist.
Isn’t it funny that we expect world peace when the common family unit requires so much repair? How many people can actually say that they have a good relationship with their parents? I wonder.
I’ve always thought that a person I could be seriously involved with would have to have a good relationship with his mother and father. Or at least one parent. It’s like a sign of how well someone can accept someone loving them unconditionally even though they are faulted. Human. Capable of making mistakes and always requiring some sense of growth to be…fulfilled.
Boy you don’t even know.
That’s why I’ll keep my distance.
I could love you so easily.
But I doubt that you are capable of
giving the love I need.
And I’ll forgive you for making it
hard to ignore,
How I like it despite how my mental jaw drops
to the floor
each time you enter
the room
Baby I try not to swoon
you make it hard to keep it together.
You got some strength
of mind
and a body to match
.
I can’t even try to type about him right now. It’s so silly.
I just hate how I even noticed him. How I paid attention to what he was wearing because I thought he looked so good in it. How his words were so well put together. That’s hot. And then he stays after class to talk to me about my trip to Florida? To find how old I was? He was clearly flirting. Clearly. And it can’t be because he’s trying to bribe a good grade out of me. Because he clearly has the brain and ambition to get his shit done right. But that just makes it harder not to think about…anything.
I get mad sometimes.
At myself, for behaving the way that I did
because of my emotional hope
rearing its desirous head.
In high school I was so boy crazy. Not at first. Not until I began to realize that I was not what boys seemed to want. It wasn’t about putting out—it was something else. And for years I believed that it was because I was overweight. But then I did realize that I hid my body anyway. That had I carried myself with more confidence, it would have been easier to attract the opposite sex. And the moment I began to feel better in my body I saw that people, not just men, but people reacted. Positively.
That’s why it’s difficult for me when some girl is standing if front of me reassuring me how amazing I am. Does she think that I don’t know that? Does she think that I need reaffirmation from a complete stranger? Granted, it is nice when someone who barely knows you feels confidently that you are an amazing person. But—I don’t know. It’s a little degrading, I think.
Maybe not. Maybe I’m being more judgmental of a drunk girl than I need to be.
I hated how he reached around me as I was hugging his girlfriend. How he grabbed my hand as I walked by. Reaching out now, after all this time. Groping for my acceptance. And me reciprocating.
I hate that he still has any power over my ability to just enjoy the evening. And I know that I let him. But it’s like a secret that I have to hold onto. That even though outwardly it is over, it is resolved, I have this little piece of me that wants to cling to him kissing me and holding me and admitting how much I mean to him. That’s a sweet part of our abstract history that I cherish.
Why does sex change things? Because then, on a whole different level, someone wants to find a way to make you happy. It’s like their egos recognize that they can’t truly make you happy happy. So then they want to be the one to be the source and the fulfillment of corporeal desire. Since they can give you nothing else in the way of spiritual appeasement, they seek to worship and appease the temple that is your body. At least he should.
And that’s the thing. If I can’t be with someone, I can’t be with him. If my body doesn’t feel right under his hands, then that’s it. And there are few hands out there that have really made it feel right. Fun, yes. Entertaining, sure. But deeply satisfying, rarely.
I get mad that I shared my body with him—only because he was probably too fucked up to register what it was that I was sharing with him. This vessel. This one-of-a-kind all mine shape. I let him inside me. I kissed him with real kisses. And all I got was civility the next day. A shallow disregard of what had happened. Part of the haze that was being drunk.
The vase tipped over, just about to fall, to clang against the metal of the patio table.
Caught on the arm of a watering can. Collecting drops of the rainwater that drips from the sky and through the wooden slats of the second-floor deck.
The cold water.
Coming
down.
I think poetry must be an auditory experience.
I am not much of a reader of poetry. Unless I am so moved to read it aloud. Words on page can be lovely, pretty, well-shaped and pieced together,
but their sounds are meant to be made. Their consonants pronounced,
their weight added to by the cadence of an individuals voice.
I miss singing with a band. I want it so badly to be a part of my life. And it is just done. Gone. And I have to start again.
I know it isn’t as if that were the first person I made music with. But it is so difficult to find a guitarist with whom I have a true musical chemistry. Someone whose soul can groove the same ways mine wants to.
Damn.
I noticed how his girlfriend is obnoxious, though loving, when she is drunk.
I noticed the vase that we used for the fourth of July picnic,
knocked over,
leaning
on a watering pail,
both left out on the patio table.
The vase’s water brown,
the flowers dried and bent,
just abandoned
even after their scent and color has faded.
Died.
A new visiting nurse came to check on my grandmother today. My grandma had trouble recalling what it was that had caused her back injury. I wondered if the nurse imagined that we were not taking good care of our grandmother. When the truth is that she had given up long ago, resigned to a life of stillness, similar to death but still breathing, still observing, like a ghost who hovers over the lives still growing and aches to be able to participate. Only she can. Or maybe she can’t. Maybe her body is spent and all there is is rest until the final rest.
It saddens me. No one can argue that living with someone so close to death is depressing.
She is a person whom I have come to know in the winter of her life. She is the woman who gave birth to my mother, who is responsible for partially shaping who my mother is today.
It is not surprising that my mother developed so much ambition. To escape.
Funny that I am mostly comfortable.
I’m not, totally, but
mostly.
There is this desire to be free. But what would I do? I would struggle more than I do now and probably create some level of drama for myself just to feel entertained.
When living here I am entertained by the drama of three generations of women, still all trying to figure out how to exist. How to coexist.
Isn’t it funny that we expect world peace when the common family unit requires so much repair? How many people can actually say that they have a good relationship with their parents? I wonder.
I’ve always thought that a person I could be seriously involved with would have to have a good relationship with his mother and father. Or at least one parent. It’s like a sign of how well someone can accept someone loving them unconditionally even though they are faulted. Human. Capable of making mistakes and always requiring some sense of growth to be…fulfilled.
Boy you don’t even know.
That’s why I’ll keep my distance.
I could love you so easily.
But I doubt that you are capable of
giving the love I need.
And I’ll forgive you for making it
hard to ignore,
How I like it despite how my mental jaw drops
to the floor
each time you enter
the room
Baby I try not to swoon
you make it hard to keep it together.
You got some strength
of mind
and a body to match
.
I can’t even try to type about him right now. It’s so silly.
I just hate how I even noticed him. How I paid attention to what he was wearing because I thought he looked so good in it. How his words were so well put together. That’s hot. And then he stays after class to talk to me about my trip to Florida? To find how old I was? He was clearly flirting. Clearly. And it can’t be because he’s trying to bribe a good grade out of me. Because he clearly has the brain and ambition to get his shit done right. But that just makes it harder not to think about…anything.
I get mad sometimes.
At myself, for behaving the way that I did
because of my emotional hope
rearing its desirous head.
In high school I was so boy crazy. Not at first. Not until I began to realize that I was not what boys seemed to want. It wasn’t about putting out—it was something else. And for years I believed that it was because I was overweight. But then I did realize that I hid my body anyway. That had I carried myself with more confidence, it would have been easier to attract the opposite sex. And the moment I began to feel better in my body I saw that people, not just men, but people reacted. Positively.
That’s why it’s difficult for me when some girl is standing if front of me reassuring me how amazing I am. Does she think that I don’t know that? Does she think that I need reaffirmation from a complete stranger? Granted, it is nice when someone who barely knows you feels confidently that you are an amazing person. But—I don’t know. It’s a little degrading, I think.
Maybe not. Maybe I’m being more judgmental of a drunk girl than I need to be.
I hated how he reached around me as I was hugging his girlfriend. How he grabbed my hand as I walked by. Reaching out now, after all this time. Groping for my acceptance. And me reciprocating.
I hate that he still has any power over my ability to just enjoy the evening. And I know that I let him. But it’s like a secret that I have to hold onto. That even though outwardly it is over, it is resolved, I have this little piece of me that wants to cling to him kissing me and holding me and admitting how much I mean to him. That’s a sweet part of our abstract history that I cherish.
Why does sex change things? Because then, on a whole different level, someone wants to find a way to make you happy. It’s like their egos recognize that they can’t truly make you happy happy. So then they want to be the one to be the source and the fulfillment of corporeal desire. Since they can give you nothing else in the way of spiritual appeasement, they seek to worship and appease the temple that is your body. At least he should.
And that’s the thing. If I can’t be with someone, I can’t be with him. If my body doesn’t feel right under his hands, then that’s it. And there are few hands out there that have really made it feel right. Fun, yes. Entertaining, sure. But deeply satisfying, rarely.
I get mad that I shared my body with him—only because he was probably too fucked up to register what it was that I was sharing with him. This vessel. This one-of-a-kind all mine shape. I let him inside me. I kissed him with real kisses. And all I got was civility the next day. A shallow disregard of what had happened. Part of the haze that was being drunk.
The vase tipped over, just about to fall, to clang against the metal of the patio table.
Caught on the arm of a watering can. Collecting drops of the rainwater that drips from the sky and through the wooden slats of the second-floor deck.
The cold water.
Coming
down.
I think poetry must be an auditory experience.
I am not much of a reader of poetry. Unless I am so moved to read it aloud. Words on page can be lovely, pretty, well-shaped and pieced together,
but their sounds are meant to be made. Their consonants pronounced,
their weight added to by the cadence of an individuals voice.
I miss singing with a band. I want it so badly to be a part of my life. And it is just done. Gone. And I have to start again.
I know it isn’t as if that were the first person I made music with. But it is so difficult to find a guitarist with whom I have a true musical chemistry. Someone whose soul can groove the same ways mine wants to.
Damn.
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