Emotion and Strength

DIVORCE FROM FATHER BY CHILD/REN, WRITTEN BY MOTHER

I don’t think you understand the consequences of the choices you have made.

You have chosen to disown an imperfect person and his imperfect family.

Your choice has forced structural instability upon the lives of everyone in this circle, including your own.

You decided to make yourself an enemy of renewal and forgiveness, declining change and improvement until nothing was left but destruction and inconvenience, burden and disharmony. A party to avoidance, you have rejected restructure and welcomed financial stress which drips like rain over whomever of us survive this. Including him; encompassing all.

You have disempowered a future of ease and empowered hardship, without recognition for the claws it sharpens. You have dislodged all our futures because you wear cement shoes and cannot take a step in new directions. So you bury in and shovel demands from wounds unhealed to wounds now never closing.

It’s too bad for those who are pulled down into your depths, yet, who have struggled for decades to stay afloat. The weight of emotion now heavier than reality as it sinks in – yet ghoulishly absent for some. Oxygen scarce as money now, as it bubbles here and there before it empties.

This is the undoing of the life I selflessly created. The sacrifices I made for those I birthed worth only the scars they now leave behind.

HINDSIGHT

Hindsight
is just as hungry to be heard
as a mouth without a tongue;
hidden behind a glossy pupil
are all the words it lays claim to

VOID

Starving for love
might feel like hunger
but feeding oneself
morsels of
acceptance
fills any cavity

DAUGHTER

The way your lips wrinkle
when you are mad,
they become drawstrings
tugging at my heart
and pulling my insides out
through my throat,
choking my airway
with the density of the package
that leaves my body.

The way your eyes crease
and vacate their sockets
empties my chest
like a plug drawn from its bath
while the water gorges upon itself
through a hole so tight
that if not already liquid,
it would soon,
thusly,
pressurised,
become.

The way your ears deafen
and your back turns
is like running a marathon facing a wall:
the distance
expanding between us a window
that not even light could escape
– a black hole
within which I am steadily descending,
yet,
my pinpoint of focus
remains only on you.

The way your feet bury themselves
into the floor as you leave
is like the tick-tock-tick
of an urge
to counterbalance those thuds
by breaking into pieces
to fall everywhere you are not
for fear you might walk deep an ocean
and sink
– perhaps I can be your everywhere raft
and build myself around you.

The sound of your smothered crying
finds its way into the cavity of my ears,
into the bones of my chest,
and into the lungs
that as autopilots,
empty,
only to fill like oceans for your tears
in fear they rise
and you drown
and I drown
before I reach out my hand
in time to save you.

The hours you burn alone in your room
is like fighting your fires inside me
only to self-char on the outer
like an over-engraved parent
carrying flesh coloured wishes
of how I might take your flames
and turn them into flowers
that bring colour into your
otherwise
darkening
facade.

FOR ALL INTENTS

Taking into account
the rough seas
and heavy winds

Taking to heart
the obscene and greedy
thoughtless sins

Putting aside
the time outs
and time aways

Wading through
the perfect storm
to fiercer waves

Pulling apart
the silent screams
and heated venting

Dragging behind
the broken dreams
and coming ending

Weathering days
and sleepless nights
to see the morning

Our ship has sailed
and come what may
of a new day dawning

HOPE FULL

Your love is like a winter icecream
and my funeral pyre tongue
knows only to lap it up.
Snow forms in my eyes all the while,
though I left my shutters open to fan the flames.

A warm breeze still dances its way
along the finery of my deepest thoughts,
sidestepping icepick arrows – the
drawbridge of kindling that spills from your throat garden.
Impossible not to swallow,
yet the aftertaste burns like a forest fire;
all the drowning promises now an ocean’d moat for your castle walls.

A drawn bridge might just as well be a goodbye on this canvas,
but the artist within me paints in colour.

ENOUGH, AS I AM

Enough, as I am.
All of me, a star made of silver upon a chest of self-love,
sherriffing whole as I can whilst empty –
lapelled to this shirt like a butterfly with cotton wings.

GIVE ME A MOMENT

There is a power in softness, a rough tremor
weeping through every pore without a
scathing sound – the opacity of white noise
calming the soul with feathery pause.

Release it,
tame at last as passing thunder –
its mane, feline, and gentle,
its belly,
turned upward,
eyes closed.

UNBOTTLED

sometimes
your feelings
have people attached to them

PAPER HEART

paper thin
my wordless heart
mistaken origami art
naked – stark – pristine – unfolded
(chapters lost before they start)
my heaving chest its leaving ark
escaping from the boundless dark
in seas of inkless tears to mark
the day you drowned my
paper heart

STOIC

There is nothing,
short of absence

flocked as well in chasm as expanse;
deplete of all and nourishment
in trance with echoed dance,
which,
farmed as wealth for plunder
wears a cold and faceless frieze;

as lingering and as formless,
it, bequeathed in whole disease
whilst bounded by detachment
mirrored, stale
and faint,
and seized

as broken hearts denied repair
to leak, unprized, uneased

EMBERS

As a rule,
I have learnt to fraternise with dreams for gain,
profiting not from indiscretion,
but in the karma sought within such mindful revenge.

Were it possible
to simply matchbox my raw emotion,
the kindling its casket contained
may encourage wild arson –

but perhaps it is less of a burden
to fuck you while I sleep
than to thank you for stoking my fire
while clothed in its flame.

UNKNOWN

She was not brave,
she was necessary.

LAPSE

She recovered her heart
with yesterday sighs
–
and only her tomorrow smile
knew enough about courage
to forgive the delay

I HOPE WE MAKE IT

I have no tolerance for hope. Hope survives
on leftovers and unwilling loss: a soiled casket of
emptiness for every six feet of paragraph
it wades behind. Hope stuffs itself between the words
and the meaning, loudly camouflaged by
gambling and cigarettes, declining to altercate but
lathered by a demand to be seen. It shuns you,
but needs you desirable, a voyeurist: a
lap dancing ghost to keep it current.
Hope is a pimp
and you whore yourself to keep it primed,
shedding your skin like a puree of missing passports,
onion tears soaking sensibility after raw
sensibility, riding hope faster than your hips can keep up,
because, and after all,
there has to be a better place than this.
Time is just an expanse to harness,
a mount for crossing –
and you must wager everything,
from soul to sex
to grind it hard to a halt.

PERMISSION TO RISE

Am I brave enough yet to emerge
to escape the regret
to dismantle
forget
to demolish the surge of this
plundering ache
to curb and to conquer
and famish the quaking
– this suffering silence –
this violent breath taking

Am I whole enough yet
to prohibit the shaking
snaking my flesh with
its mandible gaping –
and I
an invertebrate
sensing
it
raking
its
claws
like it’s tilling a field in my pause.

– I AM –

I am soul enough, rousing to roar
but will this awareness
alone be the door to implore me to forfeit
renounce and withdraw from
this former attachment
to lapse while I stall
while in fragments
I catch myself falling
before
I submit to this whiplash of
“worth less” and war

mauling through self–harm
rejecting my core

Perhaps in my rapture my courage will capture
the thrill of detaching
unlatching
resolving
forgiving myself for my lack of evolving
for dressing tornadoes I’d wade in
– dissolving –
while anchored by nought but
the grief I was holding
by swallowing pain
– almost framing each frame –
as the slower the memories
the faster they came and the longer they’d last
it would tighten their hold
and the closer they’d weave they would blindfold
and frighten
and once I was frozen and broken
– eyes widened –
they’d leave

Perhaps fate will gift me a shift
from my history to bask in my victory
and mask my past injuries
and race to new mysteries
and questions, unanswered
and answers, un–asked
but desperately fancied
as I take on this task to have finally been caste
to have grown from my hate
to have flown past a place
where my purpose was faceless
to race to a moment I have hungered to taste
in a time I had dreamt of
instead of erased –

to a piece of the peace I deserve
and a truth to embrace

Will the aching forsake me at last
and the healing re–take me
its journey as vast
as the path it will trace to re–shape me
I ask
and will it profess to regress to
a time I could heave less
bereaved less
and
survive long enough to emerge
at my boldest and best?

The answer is ‘yes’

A GLASS HALF FULL

I am a glass half full of
everything
I feel seems to swallow me
instead of I
it
is not a smooth rush
down my open
mouth
the words that hurt me again
in ways you will never
understand
what you say before
you open your lips to
speak
through your eyes like I am
trying to do in my
silence
comes in thin spaces
between what you say and what I
don’t
know why it needs to be so complicated
when all I feel is
emptiness
fills me like a glass half full of
impotency
rides you easier than I ever could.

METAMORPHOSIS

punishment
in the language of hope
scorching its way with splintered paddles
down to the roughs of my hungry feet
and teaching me
equally
of steadfastness and self-love
through the blanketing challenges of escape

FUTILE

I tire of love and terrorism;
the way my broken heart
lay claim to territory unknown before;
the way the softness of these blankets
fall like bombs in your wake;
the way the hunger for calm strikes and
starves and
feeds in rations;
the way the post trauma stands guard at closed eyes
and charges ahead when I wake;
the way it loops itself about my mushroom cloud
and belts its breath on my cheek.
I tire of scratching at hope like
hope will reward me for lasting the week.
I grow weary of this kamikaze daze:
my eyes, the reflection of every wound I bare.

I tire of love and terrorism:
the way my broken heart ignites from within,
limp and lost,
from so much exploding without.

WHAT REMAINS

What remains of our more recent differences, those
saturated words fallen from the lacy cuffs of our noble tongues, the
sound-filled garments and raspy lingerie custom fit
for implication and blame – what remains

but the pungency of battered verdicts, the jesters
of white noise and spicy hung detachment, the
midnight winds of halitosis fouling casted spells:
an alphabetic bouquet of gambled persecution,
the weight of which we transport as we fade away

AFTER LOSS

There comes a time when
moving forward is a monumental act
of self-preservation;
walking away,
a feat of rediscovery;
and letting go,
the key to finding true purpose.

WHIP

You are my story
and I escape within these pages
of your unmapped strength
through pauses
and the violence
that collects each letter:
another lash I want
and need
but don’t deserve

CONFUSING GREY

It is unlikely as you reminisce,
that I,
white as your black is dark,
appear largely unobstructed
in your mind
– stark, as my naked is bare –
a ripening contrast of shadows
raining over my image;
and from where I stand I feel
the wetness
as it pours upon my hair.

Muddied storms rise between us
– a collage of painted quicksand
from my toes to my lungs –
my attention taken from ‘escape’
to ‘survive another night’
for another day;
running at a loss from your black
with my concrete feet
to my canvas of white
from the pain of this confusing grey.

REPOSE

I am glad these butterflies my
silent stomach houses feel more
at home knowing you will
never return than when they
were hoping you might.

TE WAIRUA FREE (‘The Free Spirit’)

my spirit needs mending
but I have no coloured thread
to darn these fraying burdens

the eye of this needle lay gaping and empty
and I am standing on its edge ready to fall through

a knot to my ankle, and my fast surrender,
and I’ll fly deeply in to weave new dreams

a fresher self with perfect stitching
– an un-perished disaster –
still surviving in spite of her erupted soul

NOT IMMUNE

i am
tormented
by your need
for distance
but not immune
to this burden
of recapture

SILENCE LIKE WINE

it is not okay
to spill silence like wine
into my emptied heart
for it is already filling with emotion
and the hungry spaces in between
are not for getting drunk