My Passive-Aggressive Notebook

My passive-aggressive notebook and I are in denial. We pretend that we know why we are miserable and if we are just angry enough, we can fix it. We pretend that this is something that will pass.

We are stupid.

My broken spirit and I are confused. We are bewildered that getting everything we wanted isn't what we actually wanted. We don't know why being together is so much harder than being alone.

We are blind.

My painful realizations and I are becoming resigned. We are starting to understand that what's good for the masses might be what's trying to kill us. We are beginning to notice that what's missing around here is an escape hatch.

Drown

Sometimes, when I just happen to be drowning
I will reach out; sometimes I
just drown. Every now and then,
every once in a while, I look
outside of myself for an answer;
most of the time I am content
to be wrong.
Most often, I throw the first punch.
More than not I am the culprit, the guilty party,
and I stew in my refusal
of acknowledgment.

Long-Distance

There is a piece of my heart that you hold
so far away from me -
not like a child playing keep-away, taunting
until I'm in tears,
but you hold it close, cupped inside of your hands
like a firefly that you're desperate to keep
and desperate to keep safe.
It aches, inside of those delicately touching hands,
glowing red and sending pulsing reverberations
back into my chest, across those long miles.
It aches, but it nestles there inside your hands
because that is home.

A Conversation

I took a couple of stabs at this Poetry Thursday prompt before I came up with something that I actually liked. I was sitting in my room, agonizing over my long-distance relationship in my head and thinking that that was what I wanted to write about. A conversation between me and myself. That attempt fell extremely flat. Then, unbidden, this conversation came out of my fingertips, and it felt right. It also refused to have line breaks, but I'm not sure if it really qualifies as prose poetry. Either way, here it is:

* * *

I’m going to whisper now so that they won’t come in and turn on the lights. I’m going to whisper-sing to you under the sheet, with the flashlight, just as if we were children again. And even as I’ve barely opened my mouth, I know what you will say. You will say: You’re silly. You know that no one could find us here. We are hidden by the darkness, by the driving snow. Our voices are lost in the wind where we may never find them again. I know this. You know that I know this, just as we both know what the scar on our wrists means; this is a secret that we will never share, have sworn to keep even if tortured with tin foil against our fillings or feathers against the tender soles of our feet. You know that they don’t know where to come looking. We’re as safe as church-mice in their holes. We can sing two-part harmonies with our voices held up and burning like torches. You’ll tell me this, and still I’ll confide in you in hushed tones. I’ll wrap up my fears and my deepest desires in tiny handkerchiefs and I’ll hand them to you, knowing that you will not drop them to shatter at our feet. You’ll accept them, but you’ll laugh just a little. We don’t have to whisper, you’ll tell me, with our powers combined… And we’ll hold our wrists together and giggle like the schoolgirls that we’ve always been.

I'm Back...

Okay, so I was way off in thinking that I was going to rejoin Poetry Thursday two weeks ago, but I'm finally managing to get the creative gears turning again and so today I'm back in action. The following poem is quite rough, and not at all what my mood meant to write (I've been pretty much elated most of the time lately), but this is what came of the prompt. I used the Randomizer to get three words (I decided that 3 was the magic number this week) and took those three words and put them into my poem. I'm going to italicize those three words in the poem, just so you know what I was working with.

I've missed everyone, and I'm so glad to be back! AND, it's my birthday today! I am officially old.

* * *

I draw my arm
across the serrated edge, feel each tooth
as it tastes my flesh, grips it
and passes it on to the next one
down the line. There’s something there, a control
that provides comfort
that can’t come from the written word or screaming
nonsense into my pillow. My pillow
that I tossed carelessly
to the edge of the bed, rumpled
and near-to-falling, blinking in the neon flashings
from the dive across the street.
“Cocktails” it says.
Or really “Coc ta ls”
with the letters that burned out sometime
before I graduated high school and they never
got around to replacing. And in the flicker of the light
the droplets that have spilled
onto the hotel-white sheets, they look a special
sort of iridescent and I can hardly believe
that they came from me.
And I stare at them
and I fret that maybe I have done something
wrong, let something go
that maybe I would need later. And then
I take another sip of wine.

Blue

Then this morning I wake up the wrong color and my vision has clouded and as the sun inches its way nearer the horizon, I'm already in the dark. There is this tugging at the edges, like tiny fingers with miniature claws have a hold on those parts of me that hover just to the back or the top or the left of my line of sight; it's like an itchy tingling or a painful tickling and there's just no way to reach around and pry away those small digits. And as I think on it more it's like quicksand with a center of aching - I'm being pulled down from the middle where a marionette's string is attached to that pump in my chest and it's dragging with a relentless gravity, and it doesn't care how loudly I try to scream my resistance. All of the while, during all of this clawing and pulling and sinking, all of the while I go on. I go on like a good little soldier with a smile on my face and no matter how much I want to be able to need you out loud, I won't do it.

Certainty

The first time that my eyes
moved over your shape
there was this magic, this lightning bolt
of electricity that was so unlike
anything that I had ever been struck
by before. It came down upon me
as if thrown by the arm of a God-Cupid,
a creature that I previously believed
extinct - if it ever existed at all.
I was jolted, hair standing on end,
the breath gone missing
from my chest. I blinked and blinked
and shook my head;
your outline neither wavered
nor disappeared.

* * *

I've been absent, as I stated before, and I'm rusty starting back. This week I intend to re-up my participation in Poetry Thursday and in Sunday Scribblings and to write something that's less rough and unfinished than what's above. But I needed to dip my toe back into the water, see if I'm ready to wade back in (if not actually start to swim), and this is how I've done it. I can't wait to reconnect with everyone that I've missed dearly, and I'm actually going to do it as myself one of these not-so-distant days...