Final goodbyes

Sometimes we need to hear healing words from someone. I needed to hear that I am not broken. That my preoccupied attachment; that did not result from my choices, does not make me unlovable. It does not make me unreleasable. I found myself rifling through all the old emails Nathan sent me. The terrible and the awesome. All the cute things I could find. Myspace was like this mass communication we had-and sometimes it was all we had. The way he spoke to me made me feel like a whipped dog. I hid under any emotional furniture I could find-but mostly, mostly I just loved him til I thought my heart would beat out of my chest to find him, to help him. I let the horrid things he said go unchecked. I took all the abuse because I was needy, I was broken, and no one could ever want someone so damn wounded. I was wounded-but not wounded in a crippled, dilapidated, malfunctioning sort of way. No, I was wounded like the puppy who trips over her own feet trying to chase a butterfly.
I was wounded like the child who misjudges her weight on the tallest tree in the yard and falls flat with no one there to mend her.
So yes, I am wounded. I can see that it isn't always such a terrible thing to have wounds. Nathan was wounded too. I don't really know what made him lash out, what made him choose not to marry me before I got to the point  I did and left. But as my friends pointed out-something inside pleaded I walk away. In a moment of weakness (or strength) I walked-and boy did  I give myself hell for that.

The point here is that I haven't let it go. I was keeping records of all those feelings because I wanted to be able, always able, to go back and recall the feeling for him. With him I burst with enthusiasm and triumph-equally, I sunk to the lowest places of my entire existence. I always wanted to chronicle that so I could go back and feel again. Like I left all the real feelings when I left him. I think, in my mind, I was walking away from the only real thing I had ever or would ever feel-when I left him. I also went back many times. I felt like I was broken because he confirmed I was unloving-that I would sabotage everything I ever loved. I had done it when I was 14 and he said it was miraculous I ever got out of that pattern with him-but he always had faith I would go back to that.
I am not 14 anymore-and I won't go back. So if I actually want to stop sabotaging my relationships I need to let him go. All the memories, all the happiness and all the pain. I need to let it be the past and stop breathing life even into his memory because he is dead. The 14 year old I loved-is dead.
I watched him die.

I can attach to someone else, even if I could not attach to my mom or dad. I can rely on someone else, even if they were unreliable. I do not have to keep being afraid someone is dead just because they are out of sight. Maybe if I chant that mantra enough I can make it real to me.

And so i take the time here to write as I feel-
Nathan Douglas McCreless,
I know that I was cruel in my youth, but it was the best I could do at the time. I also know you were cruel and it was the best you could do. I love your smile and your writing and all the silly moments we shared in the wake of storms in our lives. I thank God you were there to help me through it. Thank you for that support and thank you for being my ally and allowing me to be yours. You hurt me so badly with the things you said to me and the way you treated me. I need to release that now. I forgive you for the way you treated me. I cannot accept you into my life again-or even those words as memories because they are toxic. I know you tried to be happy as best you could with what you have. With all that being said

Goodbye


-even if it is silent.
(I deleted my Myspace and with it all the communications. I didn't even read through them all. I hope I remember this, my strength in letting this go. It is time to stop holding it all in a vault and just release it. ) Thanks for reading
-Jem

Lost

I hate you
I won't hide it with pretty words
and nicely written prose
You don't deserve anything but the raw end

Happily ever after came in a funny way
It should have dripped through your pores
Like some still born illness
I seep out of you like blood
You'll never remove it from you
No matter how hard you fight against it

You went against the natural order
I Hate you!

In you is everything I have always hated
In you is everything I hate in me
The lies
cowardice
Inability to function
due to a false sense of idealism
It's all bullshit
We were all bullshit

But you gave it up
When I was fighting
I'm always fighting

You are letting it fuck you hard
You are giving in to mediocrity

I don't want anything for you
Maybe I do
Maybe I want to watch you burn
and gouge out your eyes
when your breath is leaving you
at the sight of the foul thing you've created and nourished to twisted precision
Much as you were nourished when you should have been left somewhere
For birds to peck at helplessly.

I hope by writing it I purge it from me
I hope I can expel this unguent catastrophe in time.
But as we both know
Hope is nothing but frail indecision about which path
to death
we'll take,

God help me if ours cross again.

(I am not proud of this. It isn't pretty and it's a part of me that makes me nauseous sometimes. It killed me to have everything I loved ripped from me. This is the not-so-healthy approach to dealing with it that I fall into sometimes. )

Crazy girl

To be free
To say all the gallant
Loving
Inspiring words
That I cannot slip forth

It would be a miracle to place my arms
Where they long to be
The miracle may not ever occur
I am not used to resting, you see

This game can't be played close to the chest
I can't see all the cards
I'm not dealing
I'm accepting the crazy girl
Inside

Who won't speak
But this time\
it is not fear that ensnares her tongue
Holding fast as it did when other words
would not flow forth

It is Wisdoms kind hand
that find's Hers within my own.
Whispering sweet encouragements
to cull this crazy girl's anxiety


I wait to let the the game play itself out
Is is so insane to let go the score?
 I won't see the end so readily if
I choose not to construct the whole presence.

So it is
I would love to place my hand in yours
See how the lines and wrinkles align
The words escape me for now
and my heart naps
Like a lion in mid-day

But come the night

How I will hunt
Ceaselessly.

Response "Black Like Me"

I'm disgusted by what I am reading, despite the fact that it was written in the 50's when segregation was still the norm. I can't believe the bullshit that was shoveled down my throat about how different blacks are from whites. I never believed it, cuz I saw that we all talked the same-that the rules were the same.

We were all at the bottom and I feel completely that showing each other kindness keeps you from screaming. That gluttony, sex  and sin keep you from going insane. In many ways I think my dad was just looking for someone beneath him so that he felt a little higher on the damn totem pole.
It is operative to mention that I am reading Black Like Me-a novel written by a white man who chose to turn himself black to experience life as a 'Negro man'.
The obscenity of the unabashed hatred made me want to v omit. Some of that hatred for anything to take away the hatred for ourselves made me crazy
I wish I could align all my thoughts and write this eloquently but for now I will simply say the things that struck me most.

One quote where he says that every black man is trying to live by the white man's rules and that those that are accepted by white men turn on one another. It makes the mind crazed.
How much I identify with the culture, way of speaking and feelings of Griffith as a black man. But then I am pulled towards not being allowed to feel that way because my skin is white and I cannot understand-even if I do feel like a lot of the feelings are part of my identity-they have been very silent parts. I keep them hidden.
How the black shoe shiners would not help the beggar and took pleasure in being above anything. Much like the powerless abused child that in turn abuses the dog. I feel thankful I never took to abusing things. I never wanted any power. I just wanted out. I wanted to have not been born, but that is a story for another time.
The kindness and kinship in times of hardship-the shower scene. Where one man lets another use his shower water cuz the faucet is broken. Such human beauty in the midst of terror.

How at the bbq place they laugh to keep from crying and are raucous cuz the only other option is to be destitute
i noticed how Griffith says that the black people stay sane by remembering that they can live with dignity and not to take ti personally. God what it must be not to have to take hatred personally. "They only hate my color".

This book is blowing me away. It may not be this way now-but hell who knows. I feel like there isn't anyone who would tell em the honest truth about how it is. Maybe I need to do a little more genuine asking.

More to come as I read. 

yeah...

Touch me like I'm a disaster

Like the slower you run

The world will burn faster

Hell, I'm burning now

You press your hand against my back

and arches run right through me

In love with a specter

You walked into me

Kiss me like rafters

leave me breathless in the rain

with nothing to catch me

I'll stand unshieldedly sane

If you tell me it's real

Hands move through your hair

like Blue Jays in spring

Agitatedly guarding  

The disaster ground brings

You race through me

Like gale force winds

Knock over my power lines

Let the electricity burn me alive

I live for each spark

I watch the lifelessness pass away

In the tempest of your embrace

And as I snap open my eyes

I blink away forlorn images of you

Running towards the morning sun.

Undone

Slap seven two seven
Divorcing denial resurfaces
Paving the interchange with
a viral fatigue

Slap
                  Seven
Two
                                           seven

Afterall,
The alternative is bitter
black, laboratories
Preparing medals and excuses
in cartons
Shoveled property of....
SLAP.


727
::I wrote this during class. We were doing case studies so I took words from each one and made a poem completely from the words I found in the case studies. Yeay, class boredom::

on race

I'd like to say I'm angry, cuz it's easier that way
Punch you in your face
Like the sucker punch that were your words
on already vulnerable ears
Ears the color of wagons I was wheeled around in
as a small child
But only if I see the sun
Otherwise they're just ivory utensils...
"Ivory utensils that observe as they wish", you say

I know how it must look to you

But it isn't
When you take away my wagon color
when you write me down in your history books
as nothing but void of hue...

grayness

By definition you take away my right to culture
My right to the red man's lament, maybe?
 I feel every day
It's unspoken and unseen...

Much like the impoverished blacks, and Rednecks lament was unseen.

There were white slaves when this country was founded
The condition you refer to-slavery-
look up where it came from
Slavs- Whites of East European Origin.

We're all in this tormenting society of humans together.

My tears are for all the injustices
I cry for being an outsider!
who wants badly to be let in,
who wants badly to stop being incriminated,
by a face that depicts a story in contrast to my experience!
I cry for the fact that any person feel uncomfortable in their skin,
as I do.
I am not devoid of hue
my background is not grey.
But on most days I'm white girl,
gone grey.
I am colored with all the bloodstains on the Trail of Tears
 I am marked by memories of platanos y arroz con pollo
hardships of a racial
identity
I can hide from.
Assert.
or give up....
Yes, I have thought about what it is to be white

Passing does not mean you excel.
and the proof is in the grades!
You see your peers hand out A's to those who
sit quietly,
speak respectfully,
work diligently,
promote capitalism,
watch injustice done,
and cry about the differences they don't see.

I do not receive those passing grades

I can walk by and you may hear, resoundingly,
"white girl"
through that uninhibited place in your subconscious.
but when I speak -
the whites,
they hear "something is amiss....
Something deeply wrong and alien"
Their blue/green/hazel (who cares what color) eyes
switch back and forth ominously
Somehow I didn't play the role right, and gave it all away.

I am not of their shade.

I find myself locked to a color
which I can't live in
cannot escape
cannot refute to those I could find myself aligned with
and, ultimately, cannot change.


I may 'pass', as you say
but I fail at race,
either way.

Gone

I said she’s leaving on a fast train

But not quite sure where to go

She left her baby sleeping

In the bedroom all alone

She wanted to explain it

But he’d already know

That she’d be leaving

Going

Going

Gone

He told her that he loved her

And even got a ring

They lived their life in shambles but had just about everything

One could need

Now she’s leavin on a fast train

Going

Not even  God knows where

She left Him in the trailor park

All alone right there

The rearview gives her heart an ache

She knows she's doing wrong

Doesn’t stop her going

Shes going

Going

gone

Love poems

I know that I could find hope

in your hand

Locked with mine.

If ever I should know turmoil

I may also know you to be there,

as my Steadfast Guard.

And as ever I have known Love,

I have but to peer into your solid depths

to find it swaddled there.

Tempest bears no ill will for us

And life holds naught but hope