Category: FB legacy

car.talk

as soon as we reach
the place where you like to
drop me off,
you turn off the engine
and turn on the hazard lights
so we don’t get creamed by a bus
while we talk.

we twist and turn,
side by side but
in our own seats.
contained,
constrained,
conscientiously
abstaining.
I take off my seat belt or
put the top part behind my back
so it doesn’t rub me on the neck
like a tiny straitjacket.
we turn to face each other
as we talk, and then squirm
awkwardly away. I roll my head
against the headrest just like
I do on the pillow at home
when I can’t sleep, which
is always. I’m so desperately tired,
crazed with it, and yet
I can’t seem to bring myself to leave
and go back to my home, alone.

you always roll down your window
if the temperature outside
is above freezing.
I’m often cold, but I
don’t say anything.
I’d rather suffer slightly
than inconvenience you,
especially to make you
turn the car back on
just for the blessed heat
which would also
make you sweat uncomfortably.
I just hunch and snuggle
in my coat,
snap and unsnap it nervously,
or eventually take the excuse
to get out and smoke a cigarette.
if I’m going to be cold
anyway, I might as well
be smoking.

we talk about everything
under the sun, make each other laugh
when we least expect it
and neither of us wants
to say goodnight. and yet
I never dare
and you don’t seem to care
to suggest
that we sit in the back seat.
what would we do,
who would we be
without our safety precautions?

I’m afraid to find out
if I’ll become a stranger to myself
or you’ll decide you can no longer abide
my bothersome corporeality
in such a confined space
and yet I secretly long
for a some sneaky, underhanded
chance, some miracle,
some blessing,
to let me get
just a little bit
closer.

body.hate

it took me 40 years to learn
that my body is not my enemy
but my oldest, longest-suffering friend,
that my being fat doesn’t mean
I don’t deserve love or am
any less beautiful, that
when you love someone,
when their soul speaks to yours
and you can see it clearly,
unclouded by your own doubts and fears,
the vessel they are currently incarnating
becomes sanctified by its beauty –
like a candle holder,
illuminated from within – that
my body is always worthy of love
because I’m in it.

I didn’t learn that by myself,
many people taught me these things;
I first learned to love myself
by seeing myself through the eyes
of those that loved me,
and I’m still learning these lessons,
still on the path.

so
I understand.
you aren’t there yet.

I wish I could be the one to teach you,
but even if you can’t/won’t let me –
because my body reminds you too painfully
of your own abundance, because
the idea of us together
probably makes you feel sick,
because the only way
you can imagine yourself
as sexually viable
is if a thin person wants you,
because the idea that I could be fat
and still be attractive
is scarily close to
the same being true
for you –
it’s all right.
I hope someday you get there.
you deserve to be free
of body hate, too.
we all do.

the weight you need to shed
is not measured in pounds of flesh
but in the self-hatred
you’ve been carrying
your entire life.
let that burden go.
put it down, take it off, release it.
you don’t need it.

I’ll be waiting for you
at the pass on the top of this
mountain of self-respect.
the air is thin up here,
but we don’t have to be.
it’s very clear, heady, transcendent.
I can see for miles
and we don’t need our baggage
where we’re going.

scrimshaw

by far the cruelest thing
you ever said to me –
and there were
so many candidates
to choose from –
was “I believe in you”.
it seemed to be
so kind at first that
I could not believe it –
too good to be true, not real
my stunned gut said –
and it turned out I was right.
you did believe whole-heartedly
in the version of me
that you wanted to see.

you spent so much
of our time together
trying to destroy my belief
in a whole self, specifically mine,
by trying to carve me
into what you wanted,
painstakingly cutting away
all the extraneous pieces of my
life, my heart, my body and my soul
that didn’t fit the image
you held so dear.

but.
I fought back
with all my might,
having been taught
by my mother’s example
that I’d rather be a
lumpen, misshapen
piece of raw ivory
that is uniquely mine
than a carved masterpiece
of someone else’s creation.

the gamble

in our little game
of mutually assured destruction,
I betrayed my hand too soon;
I gambled big and lost it all.
now you hold all the cards
and I hate it.

in the past I admitted
certain things to a certain
heartless psychopathic fuckboy;
I lost my cool and revealed
just how very much I cared
and my feelings were turned into a weapon
that was used against me
countless times, while he
said many things he later claimed
he never meant, but never
the important one,
never the L-word
without a “we” in front of it.

see. given my ancient
and not so ancient history,
it’s no wonder I’m angry.
show me that you can be trusted
not to abuse the upper hand,
and I’ll stop feeling so outraged.
if there’s a world
where the house doesn’t always win,
I’d like to know about it.

bonsai

twisted, constricted
bent every which way, but
still striving towards the light.
I’ve been sadly warped by you, mama,
and never learned how
to straighten up and grow right.

what does sunlight look like
when it’s not filtered through glass?
what does love look like
when it’s not strained through an agenda?

trained and pruned,
grafted and transplanted
all that artifice and care
just to make me look like
everyone else.

the wires mustn’t show.
don’t look at the gardener
behind the curtain.
you wouldn’t like what you see.

miniaturized. my need for growth
was used against me.
no matter how hard I tried,
I couldn’t expand beyond
the hard limits
imposed by the tiny pot.
if left alone, I would have sprawled
over ten times that surface area,
run rampant, kudzu-like,
over all your proprieties.

the pathos of things
like trees tortured to stay tiny
but look like their normal size parents.
if this is what your empathy looks like,
spare me.
I’d rather have been raised by wolves
than oppressed by your idea of civilization.

R.I.P. Young Love

young love is hopeful. young love
has watched too many movies,
read too many romance novels,
seen one too many shows
where love conquers all
by sheer willpower.

young love is not realistic.
young love doesn’t know
how passion and trust can die
a slow and agonizing death
of starvation by distance –
when absence makes the heart
grow colder, not fonder –
or founder in the depths
of a morass of self-loathing,
rotting by degrees despite
all efforts to save it.
it’s not pretty.
it’s the opposite of romantic.
no matter how much
you think you love each other,
the relationship can die on you
and become an albatross
around both your necks.
unless the circumstances
are just right, and there are no
obstacles in your path,
young love is setting itself up
for a world of hurt.

I’m no longer young. I’ve seen love
come and go, and I have
the scars to prove it.
can you really blame me
for wanting to spare us both that fate?

my corner

what now, am I supposed to
sigh and cry and die
alone in my corner?
maybe this is a boxing metaphor
and I’ll come out swinging instead.
you really expect me
just to take this lying down?

here’s a punch: ask your therapist –
or your mama – how it is
that I’m not good enough for you
and too good for you
at the same time. ask yourself
what kind of life you get
after always taking
the path of least resistance
out of fear.
you’re the one telling yourself
this bullshit story
where you’re always the serf,
never the fighter.
you’re the one who’s deciding
there’s no point in even trying.
you’re the one who’s choosing to be
on the outside looking in.

I made a place for you
in my heart – which is not
something I do lightly, or easily,
appearances to the contrary –
and you don’t even want it.
I could fight you; I think
I could even take you,
but there’s no point.
I refuse to battle
for a place on the sidelines
when I deserve to be
the main event.

artistic license

you can take your ironic detachment,
your artistic license, your universality,
and shove it. it’s such a cop out.
like you don’t have feelings,
like everything you write is purely
in the service of art and contains
nothing of your emotional truth.
I call bullshit on that.

you say you never broke
a girl’s heart, that no one
ever cared enough
to cry over you. well, now
you can cross that off
your fucking bucket list.
congratulations! so glad
to be the one that gave you
that experience. oh, wait.
you wrote that in a poem,
which means it probably
didn’t even happen, it was
just more words you said
to get a certain effect, to please
or trouble or engage your audience.

you can try to hide behind
your artistic detachment
all you want,
but I know how
to read between the lines.
the problem with that is
that maybe you don’t even realize
what you accidentally said.

so – got it, check, nothing
you wrote was about me;
I’m delusional
again. now I can go back
to critiquing your work
purely on its merits
or lack thereof. our literary
romance aborted,
we can go back
to being friends.
as soon as I get over my
trivial little broken heart,
everything will be fine.

assumptions

I wish people would stop
assuming we’re together,
and saying what a great couple
we’d make. at first
I liked it; I thought surely now
you’ll see how we’re perfect
for each other, how obvious it is
to everyone that we should date.
but now that you’ve told me
again
that you’re not feeling it,
that there’s no future
for us in that way,
all this commentary
from the peanut gallery
is just rubbing salt
in my wounds.

yes, I know. tonight’s
complimentary bum
was clearly trying to soften us up
in the hopes of getting that elusive
pocket of change.
but even a stopped clock
is right
twice a day. it’s too bad.
our glorious possibility
could be written in the sky
in letters of fire
eighteen feet tall,
and you’d still claim
not to see it.

thanks

you just gave me another
person to avoid, another face
to have to look away from,
another set of feelings
to bottle up inside
letting them escape only
in eye rolls, sneers and withering remarks
uttered in attempted
sotto voce.

gee, thanks.
like I don’t have enough
of those already.
I could really use
a few more.