Valentine's Mayday

Disclaimers: This post isn't uplifting. It's important. Also, my husband is zero percent abusive, don't concern yourself about me. But maybe you or someone you know is wilting from unspoken weight and terror. Be alert, be brave, be respectful and caring when you reach out.

Design by Humans

Being in a poetic relationship with words, sometimes an idea hits you, drags you from your slumber, tosses and pushes you until you finally break down.

And say something.

Write something.

Even when you know it's not going to be politically comfortable. When you'll be bruised as insensitive, appalling, offensive. You open yourself to criticism and attacks from worldwide strangers because you dared to say something even when you don't know everything. From the depths of denial, victims will lash out, shaking their chains with fury. Survivors will whip you because have no right, no idea.

But when the idea, as disturbing and haunting and vagabond as it may be, raises its clammy hands and strangles the brain until surrender, the poet must speak.

Publishing controversial thoughts always draws from the shadows of anonymity those who find the argument. Those who wield wounds for wounding, hurt for hate.

Keeping it in, that hurts too. Silence invites more hurt. Not saying anything is exactly how fear and control want us to curl up and lie.

You won't like the Valentine poems that found me, that I exhume here. They may make you uncomfortable. You might have plenty to say or hurl when you're done letting me pluck at your eyes.

But if even one lover recognizes the need for help, call for rescue, time for escape, rise of courage, then sweet is the victory of words. The criticism will melt like truffles in my mouth.

I don't know why these thoughts suddenly came pouring into my mind and kept me awake from 5 this morning. I'm not experiencing abuse. I'm not crumbling in silence. But poems are always floating, waiting to intersect the open mind and heart through which they can find their voice. A poet is always trying to reach unknown depths through empathy to be a receptor of inspiration.

Each thought, like a faded soul finally finding a body again, formed a word and crawled along my brain, clawing to be heard. Not just by me. Through me, by anyone with faded soul seeking a voice through these resurrected words.

The words wailed into the universe and linked elbows with the fates, leading me—by no coincidence, I'm convinced—into this experience later in the morning:

Waiting for the train to work, I open my phone and start releasing the tortured words onto the screen. Train pulls up to platform. I find an open bench in the front car and sit down.

I look across from me to find a woman with a freshly red, swelling ridge curving from the end of her eyebrow to under her cheekbone. She also has long blonde hair, thin-framed glasses, pink sweatpants, a white sweater, a large bag next to her, but that stinging mark reveals an invisible feature of her soul: hurt. I look back to my phone as it catches fire under my fingers.

A couple stops into the ride enters a plump man in a dark hooded jacket and beanie covering his head; visible neck, arms, and hands tattooed; three spiked rings on the three major fingers of his right hand; earphone cord spilling from his right ear. He sits across the aisle, facing the same way I am.

Another stop in, he speaks up. "I hope you have a better day." His words are reaching across from me, for her attention. "I hope you have a good day. Did someone do that to you?"

I'm feeling heat rise in me, a little uncomfortable but grateful. I can only assume she nods because she doesn't speak, because I don't look up, and he continues. "Have you reported it? You should. Try to."

I look up and she looks ashamed, embarrassed. The words howl up from my phone. Do you see? We are everywhere! You must write us into extinction.

I try to paint my face with encouragement, support, love for her.

It's her stop now.

"Don't be afraid," he pressed. She nods hurriedly, leaves hurriedly.

I look at him now. "If I saw a man doing that to a woman, I would f*ing murder him."

I shake my head to acknowledge his passion, but I look away, out the window where I see her walking away slightly tilted, maybe from the weight of her large bag.

Before I get off I say to him, "I hope she is brave. Thank you for saying something."

He raises a painted, spiked fist. "Seriously, I would f*ing murder the guy. You have a good day."

I dissolve when you whisper in my ear
“No one else would ever love you”

My heart beats wildly when you get home
and I see that you're drunk again

You're funny, Valentine,
when you get others to laugh at my expense

When I'm talking to you, I sigh to see the glow on your face
from your phone screen



My cheeks turn rosy red

when your palm whips across my face

Nothing gets the fiery passion hotter
than when you touch my child

You take my breath away
when your hands reach for my throat

My body trembles
when you force yourself on me

When I stumble, you catch me—
each time—and never let me forget I'll never be good enough

I've never felt more alive than with you

Gone for the day, and I can breathe again

The woman in pink sweatpants deserves real love, a gentle and supportive hand. The feisty, spike-fisted man deserves to be loved. Do you believe you can be truly loved without exceptions, concessions, neglect, abuse?

We all deserve love and respect, recognition of our value and uniqueness. And when we are wrapped in such love, chances of us hurting others diminish. You are worthy of true love, of which my poetry is devoid. The hardness of abuse and neglect is never an expression of love; it is a flash of uncontrolled agony from someone also in desperate need of real love.

But friend, brother, sister . . . if you recognize abuse in your life, your abuser needs even more love than yours alone. They need help. That help needs to come from professionals, people who can also offer you help and protection if needed.

Be brave. Use wisdom and love. Be supportive where you can. But be safe, be healed, love as you would be loved and unbroken love will find you. Time may not heal all wounds, but what time cannot heal, love can, it really can. Especially knowing and embracing the unconditional love your Heavenly Father has for you can heal your hurt.

Reach out to someone you trust if you need to talk. Try The Hotline below. Contact me. I'll virtually hold your hand. With a gentle hand up, you can rise above and find solutions.

http://www.thehotline.org/

Be what you deserve to be.

All These Poems about Stars

source

I’m wordsick of the poet's pen
collecting constellations.
The nightsky isn’t ink, a cloth, or swatch
of every dark degree.

Stars aren’t glitterbits spilling,
eyes winking or pinhole pierces.

Not loveletter ciphers from heaven's quill.

Our eyes squint obsessively to interpret 

endless pages of punctuation.

Stars are sidereal bodies
a stoneage throw away, reporting lightyears
of birthing, flexing, gloating, exploding,
launching theirmeggedons on distant planets
ripe with impious aliens.

We spend fortunes to bend 

lenses that maximize their mystery,

but they repay us no mind.
They don’t watch or wish when we fall.

Easter Is Life

I read this poem for the first time the other day and just love it. It's not particularly religious or Easter-themed . . . but life itself is something of a pure religion. It expects a lot from you . . . all of you, really; it gives you whatever knowledge you seek from it; and you'll die for it—martyrs, all of us, for the faith of breathing.

Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade
"It's life, Carlos."

It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working and
        dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
        symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
        heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
        and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to arrive
        once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.

And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
        is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because
        you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the
        nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is
        winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
        other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
        when you fight with those you love, when you
        misunderstand, when one line in a letter or one remark in
        person ties one of you in knots, when the end seems near,
        when you think you will die, when you wish you were
        already dead—none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
        hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
        gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a
        swollen gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a
        sneeze, a bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and
        worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's life,
        and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
        destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
        abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because
        it's life—life everywhere, life at all times—and so you
        won't be consumed by passion: you will be consumed
        by life.

It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
        and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before
        you go...

Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart,
        and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and
        you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
        sweet -- your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
        stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
        separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
        separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
        the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows
        you apart in her arms.

Marvin Bell