Coffee

I like coffee.

I like the way it makes me rush

through things

makes my hands shake.

I like when I wake up

and my eyes are crusted with sleep

still

and coffee rushes in wakes them up.

I like when it becomes softly brown

with cream

and sometimes

a teaspoon of sugar

if I’m feeling mean.

I like that it’s good hot and cold,

not like me,

not like when my moods shift

from hot to cold.

Coffee is good when you need

something

to say

and it reaches

for your hand with quivers.

It is especially good when

it’s in that large mug

in your large hands

spending time

with the morning paper.

I like coffee most

when it is in a white mug

one of the ones from the 60’s

(the ones in small diners)

and I’m sitting across from you.

I like watching the cream packet

swirl and mix with the watery brown

liquid that is almost always

bad coffee.

But this is my favourite kind of coffee,

the coffee I have with you.

A Response

I used to write poetry

for no audience at all,

the lines sent off into space

like speckles of dust

lost in morning light.

The words would alight

off the page and

I’d hope

into you, but

of course they did not.

The frantic rush through darkness

letters tumbled back to me

no dial tone.

Then one grey day

words came rushing through

my own door,

language that fancied

creaking roofs and

softened faces.

And I thought what a thing

to have poetry,

to have words freely rushing in

guided by the morning light.

Public Property

You have become public property I can

trespass anytime I want

and fill your holes with crushed tin cans

and toxic waste.

Every word you say is censored with black lines,

hanging off your lips like an arrest warrant.

VHR slots spin pornographic imagery

of you grocery shopping,

choosing the freshest milk,

flexing and lifting bags of flour. Speakerphone

mouths, announcing arrivals,

megabytes of information,

soldiers trampling all over recently fertilized lawns.

Your chest is a billboard

announcing infidelity.

Your pounding, exposed flesh is coded

by the trickling of ink.

Everyone already knows you are available for the taking;

Prime real estate up the curve of your cheekbones.

running for the border all the way

down the curvature of your spine, like a crooked dirt road.

The state has declared your pronunciation of ‘mine’

a national park,

a plot point for one hundred public kisses.

NaPoWriMo day twenty three: ekphrastic poem

Civilization and Its Discontents

Moth eaten and ruinous:

the Arabic rug we once sat cross-legged on,

eating Chinese from tiny origami boxes.

You spilled red wine in the corner once,

that time we fell into peals

 of laughter

over something you’d said,

knees knocking together and apart.

I’d lie on the rug and think of Egypt,

dry sand dry mouth,

the heat of your gaze masking as

the Saharan sun

burning into me. I’d stay and practice my technique

of avoidance.

You’d relay verbatim the love notes from diner napkins,

and I’d count out the inadequacies

on my toes; run my hands up and down the carpet

and proclaim I wanted to take it with me.

When it began to unravel it started in the center,

“things fall apart; the center cannot hold,”

but what most do not know,

is that it begins at the center;

it begins at the beginning,

it starts when I say hello.

NaPoWriMO day fifteen: parody

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

-William Wordsworth

This is surely what Wordsworth really meant:

I wandered lonely as a star,

Sloppily composed belt of Orion,
When all at once I looked afar:
A patch of flourishing dandelions,
Invading the garden, amongst the beets,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Popping up everywhere
choking out my peonies,
the yellow eyes a piercing glare
not a real flower but a phony:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

I knelt down and plucked up a head,
And I forswear I am not mad:
I heard “ouch!” as it cried with dread
And wept as if it were sad:
I gazed -and gazed -but little thought
what drugs Coleridge to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
those weeds ravenous and rude;
And then my cup with opiate I fill
And dandelions perform vaudeville.

NaPoWriMo day twelve: a homophonic poem

So I decided to tackle a poem by Baudelaire to homophonically translate.  This is not as simple as it may sound.  Translating a poem in another language based on sound is difficult when you know the other language, even partially.  I had to rid my mind of all the French I knew and read the language as if I'd never heard it or seen it before.  Anyways, I tackled the first stanza of "l’invitation au voyage."

Mon enfant, ma soeur,

Songe a la douceur

D’aller la-bas vivre ensemble!

Aimer a loisir,

Aimer et mourir

Au pays qui te ressemble!

Les soleils mouilles

De ces ceils brouilles

Pour mon esprit ont les charmes

Si mysterieux

De tes traitres yeux,

Brilliant a travers leurs larmes.

And this is how it turned out:

My own fault, my sweet,

Sponging up delicacies,

Tallying up violent enterprises!

I aim to lose,

I aim to mourn

Or patiently and quietly reassemble.

Lay silent moments

they say, briskly.

But man is free only of shame,

mystery;

but the traitor is you,

brilliantly traversing the length of my arms.

I took some liberties. I think next time I will try German or something a tad more foreign to me.  The challenge was fun though!

NaPoWriMo day eleven: the five senses

 9 am poetry

That first dip,

that first plunge into the unknown.

His skin so soft and smelling of honey and my rising chest,

Breathing punctuated by gasping.  I am aware of everything,

the sun shining through the curtains,

illuminating the dust in the air hovering above us, lighting the fuzz on your

lower back.  You asking me if I am okay,

my clumsy fingers, grasping,

tracing the outline of your arms, narrow shoulders.

Traversing the terrain of your body, a fearsome thing.

Skipping literature class to keep your skin on mine for a while longer.

I open my eyes while kissing you

and you’re looking back at me, a softly flowering guilt

blooming.

NaPoWriMo day ten: "Good poets borrow; great poets steal"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;*
Shifting ghosts, gliding in and out of sliding doors.

Carrying briefcases, children, coffees,

their faces hazy, fleshy features morphing together,

moving in and out of private moments.  I slip in on their thoughts,

read the lines of facial creases like a text;

stranger’s faces become literature for the daily commute.

*From Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

NaPoWriMo day eight: Westcoasting

So I slightly deviated from Maureen Thorson's prompt for today, mainly because the prompt was to go outside and it was midnight when I wrote this (and I was cozy in bed).  It still pertains to the outdoors and the weather, just not today's weather!

Westcoasting

us vancouverites, we are prepared with our miniature umbrellas

in our trouser pockets.  Eating sushi with sand between our toes and

chopsticks in our hair. Our poor cousins to the east,

lamenting the passing of august into the brutal jaw of winter,

we glide slowly, passively, into an endless grey month of

rain.

NaPoWriMo day five: baseball

MVP

The way the sun only catches the five inches of space on your thigh,

Between the tall striped socks and the spandex shorts,

And you spend the summer with a horizontal burnt banner,

Along with a few patches of raw skin from where you slid into home

And were hero for a day.

NaPoWriMo day three: epithalamium (or, a poem about a wedding)

Caligraphy

buy a pretty dress, he says,

and let’s stand under a canopy of stars –

that’s so Victorian of you, she says,

i don’t want roses i want dandelions,

save the sonnets and give me your hands instead.

vases of flowers and crinkled invites,

ties hurriedly arranged and the ring bearer

wearing one shoe.  give me the crook of your collar bone and

i’ll be fine

red bowtie lips and a burnt flambé

and rain is spoiling aunt judith’s curls.

rosacead and whiskeyed uncle john completes the company

of the day’s clichés.

it’s all falling apart, he says,

plans and purpose without purpose.

how defeatist of you, she says,

i could live on bread crumbs and your honey skin alone.

A poem a day for a month (NaPoWriMo): Day one

It is National Poetry Month, and I’ve decided to take the challenge of writing a poem a day for a month. I think the challenge of forcing myself to do it - of summoning the words even when I feel like they have no interest in making an appearance - will be good.

Also, there’s this: napowrimo.net

Today's prompt (April 1) is a triolet.  I have issues with rhyming poetry; I am not the best at manipulating words within the constraints.  But that is why this is good practice.

Here goes nothing.


For youth and splendor

Oh to be young and blushing and shy,

modestly proudly flickering glances and batting lashes. Hands

meandering across the deep plains of his thigh,

to be young and blushing and shy –

Karaoke the proper and charming opportunity to play wry

and adult. A fugitive of family plans.

Oh to be young and blushing and shy,

and proclaiming devoted love for the most obscure of bands.

[we were so young]

We were so young

when marriage flooded our town

and drowned us all.

One after another,

swamped

by champagne pyramids

and pink silk.

“But he’s the one”

each droned on,

weary hand

on soft cheek.

“It just makes sense,”

those wild eyes,

purses filled with plans.

And then I find I’m knee-high in a crowd

of blooms,

quite happy to be stuck in this melancholy state,

quite sure that their youth

was far too unblemished.

Sometimes I Write Academic Stuff: Feminist Edition

                                     

                                 Woman as Writer: Guilt and Identity in Pat Lowther's Poetry

Margaret Atwood once put it bluntly: it is “too much of a strain to fit together the traditionally incompatible notions of “woman” and “good at something”” (Second Words 193).  The archaic incompatibility of ‘woman writer’ is no more, and yet there lingers problems of identity for the female wielding the pen.  The attachment to gender expectations and woman’s role as ‘housewife’ results in the female writer’s guilt complex in identifying as something other – or simultaneously as - ‘wife’ or ‘mother.’  Pat Lowther’s poetry, specifically How Can I Begin, Poetry, and On Reading a Poem Written in Adolescence, reflects a strain against ‘feminine sensibilities’ and explores the problem of the identity of the woman writer.  There are some basic elements in being a woman writer that are problematic: the movement away from traditional constructions of gender role and the guilt associated with this departure; the binaries of ‘male writer’ and ‘female writer’; and the complicated identity of woman writer.  Lowther’s poetry questions these vexing qualities of female writing and addresses the possibility that ‘feminine sensibilities’ are constructed rather than implicit in women’s writing; woman’s identity as writer goes beyond a basic evaluation of ‘gender’ or ‘sex’, and yet these identities are essentially inseparable.

            Lowther’s poem How Can I Begin seems to question just that: how can a woman begin to write without seeming bogged down by her sex?  The poem addresses the concealment involved in being a woman and being a writer.  For the woman on the brink of the feminist movement, there is a sense of guilt in writing, in the departure from the traditional role of woman as mother or housewife.  This sense of guilt is explored in Margaret Atwood’s Second Words, in the essay On Being a Woman Writer: Paradoxes and Dilemmas.  She says “anyone who took time off for an individual selfish activity like writing was either neurotic or wicked or both, derelict in her duties to a man, child, aged relatives or whoever else was supposed to justify her existence” (191).  A woman writer was one who did writing in her own time, after all of her domestic duties was satisfied, her husband was fed and her child was in bed.  Women would write at night, and the writing was considered a hobby, never a serious endeavor.  Thus, the woman writer was seen as supplementary, as a novelty of sorts; the woman who wrote was a deviant from tradition.  This stigma of deviancy and neglect evidently manifested itself as a sort of guilt in the woman writer.  Augmenting this guilt, Lowther asks “How can I begin? So many skins of silence upon me” (1-3), as she attempts to peel away the layers of expectation heaped upon her as ‘woman.’  After a tradition of being silent and compliant, it is a process to begin, to form words underneath the weight of expectation.  It is a struggle to begin to speak for the silent women before her – the memory of these women have become a callous concealing her own identity.  As Atwood explains, “These writers accomplished what they did by themselves, often at great personal expense; in order to write at all, they had to defy other women’s as well as men’s ideas of what was proper” (Second Words 191).  After struggling to separate the ‘woman’ from ‘writer,’ it is no wonder that so many female writers felt a sense of guilt; they felt they were not only betraying their families, but also themselves. 

Identity as woman is often in part defined by the ability to give life, but her identity is formed more complexly than that.  Lowther employs an extended metaphor in order to explain the duality of a woman’s identity. She has “become accustomed to walking like a pregnant woman carrying something alive yet remote” (5-9).  Pregnancy is exemplified here as not only a signifier of life, but symbolizes woman as creator; as an extension of biological pregnancy, as a writer, she carries with her vibrancy and life, just as she would carry and give life to a child.  Pregnancy then gains a double meaning: as a signifier of creative life, and as an expected duty of woman.  Her thoughts, “though less articulate” (11), are formed as a child is formed, beginning with a “skeleton” and waiting for “unpredicted flesh and deliverance” (14-15).  The articulated thoughts are likened to the growth of a fetus, implying a sort of unity between creation of life and creation of art.  Gertrude Stein once used this same metaphor of child/writing to demonstrate the creative process, although she argued that, “you have a little more control over your writing than that; you have to know what you want to get” (Gertrude Stein Remembered 155).  There is a space between woman as basic live-giver, and woman as creator; creation, in an intellectual sense, involves control and cognitive function, while any ‘brainless’ woman could bear a child, as she is biologically built to do.  This base traditional definition of ‘woman’ is based on the biological function of woman, or, “tota mulier in utero: she is a womb” (de Beauvoir 3). Lowther seems to be suggesting a transcendent ability in woman in relation to, but superseding, her basic biology; She possesses the ability to write and create in a way uniquely female, but the ‘femininity’ of her writing does not degrade the quality or integrity of the writing.  She pleads “I would ask you: learn as I learn patience with mine and your own silence” (19-22).  The “you” addresses a culture with archaic notions on femininity and the woman’s role in life, as well as the men who have silenced women in the past.  She asks for silence in return, as she attempts to begin to separate woman from her pre-determined identity.

Part of the trouble of defining the woman writer is in her relation and comparison to a male writer.  The binaries of male/female direct our attention to sex, and in simply naming the writer as ‘woman,’ she becomes the other; the ‘woman writer’ is the other to ‘writer,’ or male.  Atwood notes the tendencies of critics to say, “You think like a man,” she is told, with admiration and unconscious put-down” (Second Words 193).  In this comparison, “good equals male, and bad equals female” (197).  This ‘othering’ of the female sex is nearly inseparable from the definition of the woman writer; it places the woman on the other end of the scale from the male, demanding that we judge each side’s work according to the sex of the writer. Lowther’s Poetry plays with the binaries of male/female, employing such adjectives that follow the trite descriptors of each sex, such as “weak” for female and “aggressive” for male.  She says, “Firebombs are in the mind but so is love, its soft flowering explosion” (7-9).  The entwined imagery of both violence and tenderness suggests a sort of androgynous poetry; the woman’s mind is considered “soft,” “flowering” and full of “love,” while “firebombs” and “explosions” suggest a male aggressiveness.  The following stanza continues the fusion of the sexes, as she claims, “Such violence is my work’s intent. Come walk with me” (12-14).  The desire for “violence” suggests not physical violence or aggression, but an aggression of attitude in her writing.  This desire to be considered ‘male’ is partly in attempt to make such male/female distinctions obsolete, but also seems to suggest that the male/good female/bad prototype is ingrained in even the woman writer’s mind.

The role of the reader or critic also reinforces these binaries.  Ruth Robbins explores this aspect of ‘woman writer’ as existing among other writers in Literary Feminisims.  She notes that it is, “rare that the woman writer was treated as a woman writer (unless the term was used pejoratively) or that she was placed in the supportive context of other woman writers, rather than always being measured up against the men” (71).  The division of the male and female writer is based on the assumption that the female writer is doomed in her deviancy; as she attempts to be like men, or to write like men, she removes herself from being ‘woman.’  Poetry comments on this need to act or write like men in order to be taken seriously.  Lowther says, “Armour yourself with ice; no lesser shield will do. I’ve tried your customed mail of linked complacencies, and know” (20-24).  She acknowledges the difficulties in identifying oneself as female writer, sardonically recommending that the woman writer “armour” herself, or sheath herself in male demeanor in order to be accepted as ‘writer’ amongst other writers.  An armour of “ice” suggests the transient and ephemeral qualities of the adoption of male writing techniques; “ice” implies impermanence and coldness, or impersonality, which will not outlast or overcome the intrinsic ‘warmth’ or concern of the feminine writer.  She puns “mail,” demonstrating her awareness of the restraints on the female writer by the male writer’s critique and gaze.  Thus, female subjectivity is considered a flaw, and male objectivity a superior way of writing or observing the world.  Atwood further comments that a woman’s work was never reviewed without mention of her ‘feminine sensibility,’ while ‘maleness of male poets never seemed to matter (Second Words 195).  When Lowther says, “I practice love and war,” she is responding to ‘feminine sensibility’ and ‘maleness’ simultaneously, thus taking gender out of the equation; she has taken a stance against the traditional notion of adhering to one gender category, commenting on the multiplicity of the writer identity.

            The complex identity of ‘woman writer’ lies in the aggregation of the two identifiers.  As Virginia Woolf once wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (A Room of One’s Own 4).  This “room” is not strictly meant as physical space, but rather as an ‘identity.’  Separating identity and gender is not a simple task; Simone de Beauvoir also assigned herself the task of discovering what it means to be a woman.  She wondered, “If the female function [as a womb] is not enough to define woman, and if we also reject the explanation of the ‘eternal feminine,’ but if we accept, even temporarily, that there are women on the earth, we then have to ask: what is a woman?” (The Second Sex 5).  The problem of identifying woman is fraught with traditional guilt and deeply rooted stereotypes of overt sentimentality and subjectivity.  Thus, identifying oneself as a ‘woman writer’ is complex in the separation of ‘woman’ from ‘writer;’ arguably, there is no style of writing that is implicitly ‘female’ or ‘male.’  The othering of the ‘woman writer’ by her male counterparts and society’s critique problematizes this separation; the world hesitates for the ‘woman writer’ to extend the role of ‘woman’ into the role of ‘writer’ indefinitely.  Atwood poignantly elucidates the identity problem, saying “no one comes apart this easily; categories like woman, white, Canadian, writer are only ways of looking at a thing, and the thing itself is a whole, entire and indivisible.  Paradox: woman and writer are separate categories; but in any individual woman, they are inseparable” (195).  The identity of ‘woman writer’ is not divisible like a math equation, nor is the span in which it reaches punctuated as in a timeline; it functions on multiple levels.

            Lowther explores the discovery of identity in On Reading a Poem Written in Adolescence.  She begins with “Couldn’t write then maybe but how I could love” (1-2).  This can be understood as a reflection on personal youth and growth, but also collectively, “I” as inclusive of all women.  Lowther is responding not only to the critics of female writing, but also her youthful insecurities as woman and individual.  Again, the traditional stereotype of tender but brainless female is provoked, but Lowther turns it on its head, making “love” into something life-giving and nurturing.  She reflects, “When I said “Tree” my skin grew rough as bark” (3-4), ascribing an innate connection between language and nature. The connection goes one further in “all the leaves rushed shouting simmering out of my veins” (5-7).  By breathing the word “tree,” she has made the tree come alive; just as language is a part of her understanding of identity, so is nature and beauty.  The imagery of ‘mother nature’ reinforces the concept of woman as nurturer and giver of life, but Lowther has demonstrated that the woman’s love is at the foundation of creation and thus of language.  Put another way, because woman possesses the innate ability to love mightily, she also innately possesses the ability to create.  Thus, there is no need to separate the ‘woman’ from the ‘writer;’ they are identifiable as functioning together.  Atwood once reflected on the anxiety of the woman’s need to choose between being ‘something,’ or being ‘woman.’  She recalls “They were all assuring me that I didn’t have to get married and have children.  But what I wanted was someone to tell me I could” (Great Unexpectations xvi).  Lowther echoes this sentiment in the final lines of On Reading: “Even now I can almost remember how many hands I had hooked in the sky” (8-11).  The imagery of hands grasping in the air suggests endless possibility and optimism for the future, not limited to woman’s traditional role of ‘housewife.’  “Multiple hands” represents multiple endeavors, and limitless possibility.  The role that memory/temporality plays in the poem is intensified by the repetition of “I can almost remember.”  It is suggested that it is not her ability for total recall, or objectivity, that is essential in writing the poem, but rather the subjective, remembrances of shadowy emotions from the time of her youth that is necessary for her creation.

            Lowther’s poetry and other literary feminist theory suggests that the concept of ‘woman writer’ is indivisible from its parts, and yet that does not imply that ‘writer’ takes away from any part of being ‘woman.’  The anxieties associated with moving away from traditional gender roles of women with the movement of feminism and the separation of ‘male writer’ from ‘female writer’ contributes to a unique concept of ‘woman writer.’  Rather than ascribing to the archaic supposition that, “If a woman writer happens to be good, she should be deprived of her identity as a female and provided with higher (male) status” (Atwood, Second Words 198), there needs to be movement towards an understanding of ‘woman writer’ as good in her own right.  Concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘writer’ need not be divided from each other, individually analyzed, then mashed together again to form a sort of hybrid being seen as deviant in some way; rather, the sex of the author should not inform the quality of the work, whether the sex be male or female.  Lowther demonstrates her awareness of the tensions within identity as a woman and as a writer, and yet makes it possible for the woman to remain ‘woman’ while also being ‘writer.’  Identity, then, is not based on a single signifier; rather it is the summation of parts of a whole.

[nameless]

Am I the shadow of others?

When was I last steeped in fog,

Shades of grey and dingy slate.

When will they realize that I am not

 - cannot be

What I have been constructed as.

What I have constructed myself as,

A bottle full of hope,

Words

Little letters, vowels,

Torn apart and manipulated

       into another language entirely.

Marinated. Manufactured.

I almost believe it myself.

I will only disappoint when they realize

I drink out of the carton.

[this is what i should have said]

 [The Smiths]

Midnight walk, we were bundled in our wool coats.

I remember you told me:

“We don’t have to listen to The Smiths anymore”

But I like the Smiths I said.

I understood what you meant,

Then.

I’m listening to the Smiths again.

I remember lying in your bed,

The sheets mummifying my bare legs,

Us listening to sad French music.

I remember sobbing and not knowing why.

I remember every moment of pain and sound.

I think I’ve been solitary forever,

Your ghost arms never existed.

I remember you haunting me night after night,

Lying in bed with the sheets mummifying my bare legs,

Crying and lying, crying when I shouldn’t have.

I recall your lips on my hair

And the dip of skin under your neck,

Your legs so long and wrapped around mine,

Like you were afraid I’d fall off the planet of your bed.

I lay and cried when I shouldn’t have.

“She loved me, she was in love with me”

you told me.

You lied lied lied,

Lied as your legs touched mine,

Swinging on the beam so high in the barn I could have fallen.

Delirious, I focused on the creases in your cords.

Want want want, and miss,

You said

And lied.

My eyes were misty from all the lying and crying

That I shouldn’t have done.

I wrote poetry, pages and pages

That you didn’t deserve.

I waited and waited with Holiday and Simone,

Adding too much Italian parsley to my meals because

It tasted like you.

I waited and your hair got shorter and your eyes wilder

And the tenderness was gone.

Heat was on my back and you lingered still,

The ghost of you that never existed

Wanted to be

So badly

So so badly.

But the lies got deeper and

I knew.

I knew that I had woken up

And you had dissolved

While I lay and cried.

I remembered we had discussed what our children would be called,

“Thelonious…Fiona”

While we walked.

We walked everywhere in one place,

We never walked forward.

But I remembered it differently.

I remembered how wide your lips stretched

When you smiled

At me.

But I forgot too,

I forgot the haze of your face,

The one when you wanted me to be someone else.

I remembered winter and my wool sweater,

The one you called boxy.

I remember wanting to leave my body;

If I stared long enough at my wine glass

I would be the one you wanted.

I remembered it so differently

All those times

I lay in bed and cried when I shouldn’t have.

I remembered looking at myself

But ignoring my reflection

Thinking it would change,

Knowing you wanted it to.

Seeing Helen’s gaze,

Your smooth white eyes

Saying

“I love you.”

But I kept remembering it so differently

I kept remembering you passionately,

Talking about Camus and Morrissey

And the farmhouse we’d have.

I kept remembering drinking white wine in the tub,

Your pale legs surrounding my body,

Frail with delicacy, with your insecurities.

I’d remember Miles Davis and dancing in the kitchen,

While you cooked,

You always cooked.

Broken bottles of wine on the sidewalk

And your green corduroy shoulders,

Shrugging.

“I’m heartbroken.  Nothing is as sad as a wasted bottle of wine.”

Oh, but things are,

Things are as sad.

As I lay crying in my bed after you,

My ghost.

I remembered all the wrong things as I tried to forget,

And feared all at once.

Anxious for your arms,

Never realizing that they never existed at all,

Forgetting that they were false arms,

False praises and kisses,

Meant for someone else.

I would rage, I would storm,

Then I would fall into gutters,

Walk miles just so I wouldn’t feel my legs,

The ones you had once touched.

The places where you touched me burned.

Then I would curl on the edge and cry,

Curl like a child again,

Innocent, like I could take it all away.

I smoked in my windowsill,

I did,

Even though I got nothing from it

But brooding

And bad breath.

And I knew it wasn’t me but thought,

Maybe you’d get it.

Maybe my billows of despair would mean something to you,

But I was thinking of someone else.

Just like you were too.

- Then I left.

I escaped my body, hoping to escape my mind,

But your ghost followed me and spoke French,

Played me French music as I lay in my bed,

Curled,

Crying,

Farther farther farther,

But still thinking of the lies and hoping to make them truths

In another language.

I connected jazz and wine to you,

To your legs so gangly and crossed,

- I always remembered those legs!

But I couldn’t hear your steps anymore,

When they approached me and I would pretend not to notice,

When I acted oblivious to your beauty.

I guess I lied too.

The fleeting thought of you would come back,

Never dead

But I wished you were.

-       sometimes. 

I wished you’d met someone else,

Told someone else how cute you thought she was,

Sticking your tongue in her ear,

Half proposing

But only being half-crazy enough to do it.

I wished you would have done it to someone else,

Not me.

And I guess you did too.

I remember you telling me she was your soulmate.

“But it could never be like that. It could never be.”

Do you remember the way that canonball hurled into my chest?

No, you don’t.

You had made me believe I was your soulmate

But that was one of your lies.

I swung my feet on the beam in the abandoned barn.

You had wished my last name were something else,

Your obsession.

My childish ways were too much for you,

You hated when I sighed (my foundation was being eaten by moths)

You imagined I’d grow into you,

But I never did.

I was so broken by you,

I remember that.

I was so angry!

So hurt by your lies

-       this poem can’t express how hurt!

I remembered, but learned to forget

As I lay in bed and stopped crying.

I remembered that I didn’t want to be her,

I wanted to only be me,

Boxy wool sweaters,

Sighs,

Too many dresses,

Hair that kept growing without your permission.

I decided I liked it.

I liked forgetting and remembering,

The memories folding on each other like layers.

I liked forgetting your crooked nose,

Leaving it to her,

She can have it,

It grew longer with all your lies anyways.

I liked smiling and knowing my legs were mine

And not yours.

And I liked my legs.

Your memory would pass over faintly,

Like a song,

Like a ghost,

And I would wonder if I had only been dreaming.

(This is what I should have said)