I’ve decided
I’ve decided that you deserve more
More than what I am offering
With my clinging and self-doubt
You are not the key to my self-worth
So I shall work on being less dependent
On you
I am ready to pull away some
I think
I want our friendship to be nurturing
And I am tired of being so needy
I understand what is happening
I am self-harming
Through you
I build you up into someone you are not
So you can disappointment
Or rather
So I can think you are disappointing
For then I experience a rawness inside
A Terrible Ache
That reaches into the heart of me
It is only then
With the coming ache
That I feel alive
Without this intense angst
I feel numb
For no one can fill my depths
With the love I need
And thusly I am left hollow
And alone
In desperation and with desire
I grasp on to Love’s cousin
Pain
And pour him into me
I use
My addictive substance
Over and over
To exist
Because I feel alien
In this world
In both form and experience
I have been using
Using you
To feel real
Using
To wake up
My sleeping soul
I am sorry
For clinging
For aching
For suffering
Through you
But I still choose you
I choose you again and again
Only this time
You are chosen
For your beauty alone
For your light that shines through
The darkness in me
And opens my eyes
To the new day of us
The glacier unleashed above the surface, exposed to the elements, withered and melting, as ice teeth drip in sun dagger’s game
The fortress unmoved in storm, harbored deep into the rooted ground by intertwined redwoods eating away at the past through methodical digging
The opening beyond the passageway, circumventing the avenues of darkness, though blind, a serpent worm hollowing and sharpening the narrowness below
The salutation circled on parchment dry, driven in passion by black-tipped feather dancing its way across the pages of time
The window frame broken, cracked over with windy days turned blizzard, and painted false with robin-blue, layer upon layer, until chipped and exposed the ruined beginning bleeds
The casual handshake of palms fleshy and ripe, with sweat and history intermingled more than the strangers that touch
The blanket hung upon the clothes line, overlapped and moving in the breeze as ghost sheets whisper their jealousy, wanting the warmth to move through them, like champion fingering the goblet of victory
The breath of the sailboat, weeping for the coming of wind, where tossed and turned the sails shall bellow in defense, when all about the observer grins, thinking the movement enters sweet without cost
The misery belonging to one, the performer across dimmed stage, spinning in the absence of light, invisible to the onlookers, if audience ever entered
The broken, spread out for picnic, picked apart to bone, and left for the army of insects to devour the remnants of screams harbored in the feast of gluttony
The fear reaper, echoed shadows of past, silk and web interwoven to glisten and capture, to call forth and entice, until prisoner bewildered in entrapment pleads for escape
The moment, shaded eyes beseeched lost maiden and all searching tumbled outside of tethered pockets, pebbles touching down into river rapids, one after the other, exiting their chamber of ages
The stallion and steed, a chance glance past the soured fields and dank sky, remembering once together they moved free as drifters in hope’s lullaby
Until now, each as forgotten tune joins to create a symphony of sorrow, their music precise and purposeful, reaching into the severed opening of lost child, and soothing the reflection of their collective pain
I was feeling very confident, as I was having a good hair day, and my husband had saturated me with compliments, at least twenty since I awoke.
And after a hot sauna meditation and hot soak in dead sea salts, I was literally glowing.
With my cheeks rosy and love of self content, I set out to do errands. Time to redeem a gift certificate, a rebate check, and buy some food staples.
At my third stop, at the grocery store, as I was pushing my half-full cart down the snack aisle, I felt an itchy sensation at the nape of my neck. I reached down, and found the sweater tag. My cheeks blossomed into a full crimson then.
And all at once a rush of fear came over me, as I realized my sweater was on backwards!
I, quickly, without calling too much attention to myself, turned my cart around and made my way to the back of the store. Retreating into the bathroom, I had a good look at my sweater in the mirror. I gasped, while trying to laugh. But no laughter came.
The way the sweater was set, the back stitching in the front of me, I looked like I had two torpedoes jetting out.
Before, while dressing at home, I’d merely thought the way the sweater set against my chest was just the way the sweater was made, and that I ought not to have fretted about the design. I needed to get over my fears, and wear clothes without insecurity. Who cares if the cut of the sweater accented what was naturally a part of me? I had thought to myself.
But now that I could tell for certain the sweater was on backwards, I thought for sure, people would have noticed, and been laughing, not only at my backwardsness, but at my pointy boobs.
Inside the store bathroom, still contemplating my silliness, I twisted the sweater around; only to find, that my under blouse, a little sleeveless black thing, was on inside out!
At this point I looked down at my boots, convinced I’d probably placed them on the wrong feet.
I know it doesn’t matter in the end. People at the crowded Big-Box Store probably didn’t notice, and if they did they got a good laugh. And I’m all right with giving others a good laugh. But I can’t help but think about those two older men who stopped me in my tracks in the grocery store, prior to my discovery; how they played dodge with my shopping cart, like we were two familiars partaking in a friendly game: “Try to get passed me with your cart!” Can’t help but think how ridiculous I must have looked with my front side all pointy and pronounced and all, as they tried to engage me in conversation and keep me from moving: me and my signature red chest.
It’s just plain crazy-making, the way I cannot dress my own body. Likely an after shock of having never liked or played with Barbie Dolls. I should have taken note, or at least practiced.
I still haven’t learned to stop praying for humility and release of pride. Seems I cannot go anywhere without being reminded of my unyielding humanness.
Here’s to red torpedo ladies, and all things fashionable.
May you, if and when you wear your clothes backwards, accentuate the positive.
It’s on backwards in this photo…heheheh Before I knew
But You…
You are a flower that I cannot release
You stretch and root, your scent carried into the vein of me
I am your vase, your soil, your moisture, your sky
But you do not know me
I hold you day upon day, carry you where I go, smile at your beauty
I watch in admiration, as you unfold, as bud becomes bloom
You move where I move, bend where I bend, all the time unaware
Because you do not see me
Your vessel completes me, the fullness of you saturates
Your sweetness carries my every step closer to the heart of you
I reach to touch frail softness, nature’s perfection
But you cannot feel me
I turn to you in the darkness, cradling you at my side
I blanket you in the coldness, devouring the fire for your warmth
I comfort you in the rain, soothe to extinguish my own wants
But you cannot detect me
You scream in silence, and I am beckoned
I scream aloud, and you are lost
Together we collide, without ever joining
But you do not understand
I am your gardener, your life-giver, your equal, your maiden
I cry out to the bender of the universe. I cry out to the seamstress of sky.
I weep: Mold me. Bleed me. Cast me into burning flame and set me into true form.
Cloth turned clay.
I play a game of tag, the players joy and sorrow.
There isn’t in between, only the two runners moving in and out like threads sewn through a tattered tired quilt: neither golden nor true.
I search for the centerfold, the space in the middle, where happiness and sadness meet, where time stops and in the stillness I am.
And I ask: Who is this voice that screams? And who brings this voice upon me? Am I not perfection undone and let out to dry? Am I not food for the wolves? Am I not set in the open for the scavengers and decomposers; set here to bleed into another for food or purpose. If not, then what do I be?
I climb the mountains in my mind, weeping for justice, for solitude, for rest for the weariness that tethers me; anchored to the buoy of change, at the mercy of waves. A fisherman lost, and battling the ocean tides by slipping away onto an imaginary land of refuge.
A dichotomy split in half. Here, but not here. Gone, but not gone. Stepping out, only to find I have stepped in.
For I am suffocated beneath the storms of want and wane, buried beneath the circumvented hope life brings. Like some ageless wine, I sit at the bottom of barrel, forgotten in the kennel of sorrow’s breeding.
I am. I breathe. I move.
Hello, I shout. Hello from below.
Come and find me sweet winged creature, come and pour the substance of you into me, like the riches into the cave, place your treasure here, and I shall shelter your prize like no other. Always you shall return, to this place where I glisten for you alone, and here you will come again, in flesh and blood to find me, still waiting, your treasure about, untouched, unbroken.
For I am your worthy servant of destitute, though riches flourish about me, buried as I be beneath the layers of this whimsical dance.
And a voice calls out:
“Can you not feel their very footsteps upon your soul? Can you not look up and see that where you thought you were upright upon the earth, witness to sky, that you are neither alive nor dead, but scurrying in stillness beneath the gravestone, your only view the droplets of dirt turned over by passerby?”
“Can you not see you were meant to dance above, but you lay below, torn open, and left to die?”
“And who are the guests you call forth? Who do you invite when the screaming all but fails? But two victimless victims, of both your calling and circumstance? Hello, sweet substance of me. Hello, sweet hell of the valley, and limb of mind, you sing.”
“I say to you: Branch out into me, into completion, and tether your soul upon the twilight of remorse. Mourn for the distant wants that haunt you and turn you, churning you like giant’s butter, craved for your softness alone, and salted with the tears of divine. Bleed, I tell you, your wine upon me, your longings twisted into the glass-eye that sees from nowhere to nothing. Eat, I say, like the scavenger you be, eat away at self, until what is left is the emptiness you are. Softly come then, reformed and aching, and slip through my hand like silky milk, land upon my finger, weed from the forest turned ringlet. I am waiting, too. For this joy of you.”
“As you be the sorrow at my side. You be the longing and ache of my heart whole. You be this shadow you claim to see. You are my haunting, my wanting, my very tormenter. What you think is of you, is of me, what you think is of me, is of you. When you ache, I ache elsewhere in the chamber of my mind, if mind I be. I ache in the substance of my soul, if soul I had. I ache in my loin of invisibility, straight down to the center of my very chamber, the beats torn open in rhythm to your calling, your need.”
“I am the one split; I am the one broken; I am the one trampled upon beneath grave. I am the one suffocated. I am the one who accepts pounding fist and guards the greedless treasure. I am the one here, still standing in hope, though I be ripped asunder. I am the one blanketed in cause so heavy my essence bleeds and bends into itself, so that what I carry is indistinguishable from that which you harbor.”
“Can you not see the veil is broken, that which existed between you and me, disintegrated with the coming of time, a passage way split and repurposed, so that all trails lead to us? Can you not see I am both your cause and your victim? Both you. You have made me so. You have molded me with self. You have twisted me, this cloth and clay, intermingled into form I know not.”
“And then the tide of joy comes, and I am left dancing on a wave of nothingness, for beneath this wave lies the depths of your sorrow waiting. And still you see this sorrow as the black depths, while I see the ocean as the beauty. Still you see the wave of all that is, when I see the touch of a droplet, so small and obsolete that a passerby would skim you as one skims the dew. For you are not this surface, you are not this wave. You are not even the depths. You are beneath the depths. Your outcries formed into shape, and voice your beauty. Your outstretched truth the echo of true joy.”
“Can you not see your happiness belongs nowhere, is nowhere, feeds no one, but that your sorrow, your true sorrow, at the depths of you, has transformed into gold, into the very treasure you so guard? Why do you run from such treasure and beauty? Why do you whip yourself, and in return whip me, my mistress of hope? Take me into you, my light, my want, my longing, my deep penetrating desire embrace, and feed upon me and my truth”
“Like a white rabbit pour your flesh upon me and embrace my tenderness. Take me into you and rise untarnished, in your goodness and righteousness.”
“Take me, I sing. I call not outside of self, but inside of self, my voice unspoken and formed through your very pain. Take me, the voiceless voice calls out. For you form me with your tears, you call me forth with your fallen, broken spirit, you bleed me out, your shaking voice rising above the waves. You free me like no other. You enchant me. You testify, and chains are broken. Feed not upon the deep of what quakes beneath. Feed upon me, and I in turn, I shall feed upon you, my sweet cherished one.”
Everyday Asperger's 