Your aggravated aggressive agitations Make alarm bells clang in my body Danger! Danger! Hide! As my stomach churns And my blood pressure rises I'm exhausted from near-constant hypervigilance You may not be angry at me I may not be the cause But I'm in the blast radius I'm in the radiation zone Perfect collateral damage Victim of your salted earth strategy Or perhaps your target practice I am not your Linus blanket I am not your heavy bag But you would have me be those things Often in rapid succession Leaving my nerves discordantly vibrating beneath my skin
Sit with me Speak to me of Philosophy Art Spirituality Poetry Sexuality
Share with me the Beauty of your experience The intricacies of your dreams Tell me how lemons taste to you Describe to me the complexity of scent and flavor Of your whiskey Invite my deepest curiosities My darkest dreams and desires To sit at your table As you dine upon every thought Savoring each exchange Like a finely crafted meal And I will do the same
Join me in unguarded honesty Lose yourself in focused curiosity Paint my soul with meaningful words Excite me by challenging my beliefs Without burning them in shame Or drowning them in judgement
Stay here with me Suspended in the silken web We have woven between Infinite synchronized heartbeats We have crafted a spell from Two souls orbiting each other Do not let it end Until the sun greets the world anew
Watch my lips as I speak With your eyes burning with hunger I will meet you on that threshold Captivated by your mouth As you share your inner self In a verbal strip tease I drop the last of my pretense At your feet and wonder if you noticed Now the little distance between us feels too far I am all too aware of my body's pull toward yours It feels inevitable and I know you feel it too The spark of radiant connection that captures us
Words slow then stop Only body language remains Plump lips Flushed skin Fluttering lashes Subtle smiles Unbreakable eye contact Goosebumps And all from a conversation The best kind of foreplay
I am not the author of your story As much as that saddens me to admit You are the wordsmith of your tale You write yourself as the hero of your own journey Despite being so often the villain of mine But understanding how you see your world Understanding that you can be none other Than the hero of your pages Helps me gain perspective into why You write me as the arch-villain of your narrative
There is no mirror in your story You cannot see yourself And as if bespelled You see only monsters and Enemies in every shadow My pages would describe the cause As a self-afflicted curse Yours would imply the question Are villains born or made? For you would say you are The result of what others made you Be you hero or villain You are forever alone Shadowboxing every perceived threat And drawing blood from everyone Who gets too close for too long Blinded by pain and unable to See that the one causing The most pain for you is you Like a manifested destiny It becomes so
As our books sit side by side on the shelf Yours a story of never ending rage, war, and loss Mine becomes a story of surrender, retreat, and release For I am removing myself from your story It is time to make myself the hero of my own And write the closing of this chapter For I can feel the peace and love I deserve Waiting for me in the next chapters of my life I am ready to transform my story Into the self-love story I have long deserved I hope you find your happy ending I write a magic wish for that Into my final paragraph Of our chapter in my book Then turn the page to my tabula rasa Full of potential and possibilities And the freedom to write my future As rich and joyful as I can imagine it
Say the thing
Make it awkward
For we never know when the final fickle Fate
Will wield her scissors and snip a thread from our tapestry
Forever severing a connection
An action that cannot be undone
"I love you."
"I miss you."
"I care about you."
"You are important to me."
"My life is better with you in it."
Whatever the thing is you feel
SAY IT
And let it go
Knowing that you have released love
In some version
Into the life of someone you care for in some way
We are fortunate to have our lives
Woven with many threads
But as gently as we are entangled together
The severing and unraveling are inevitable
Sharp and severe
We will have loss
But we do not have to have regret
Say the thing
Make it awkward
Only Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos
See the grand weaving of our lives
How each chapter of our lives will unfold
And how and when those varied chapters will end
Within those pages we are gifted with the opportunity of choice
To give and receive love with the others in our story
Say the thing
Make it awkward
-gws
Every step I take
I'm stomping on eggshells
They cover the landscape of this relationship
Like unexploded landmines after a war
The book explained it
It explained you
It explained us
Or
More specifically
Why there is no air between us
Why there is no peace between us
Why there is little hope for us
The book
However
Didn't tell me what I could do about it
What I should do about it
The only peace it gave was that
The immobility was a real side effect
The difficulty breathing
Being
Living
Leaving
That feeling stuck was normal
It isn't a failing
But a reflection of the deeply difficult
Existence of living with
Loving
Trying to love
Being loved by
Being hated by
Being loved by
Being resented by
Being loved by
Being shamed by
Being loved by
Being eviscerated by
Being loved by
Being devastated by
A person with a personality disorder
gws
You are keen to talk about how you have abandonment issues
Well I have a truth you will not want to hear
One I expect you to run from before I'm even done speaking
YOU
ABANDONED
ME
Over and over and in more and more devastating ways
The crimes of those who were supposed to love you that have left you so aggrieved
You visited your own version on me and I was too inexperienced in love and relationships
To understand that I deserved better
To see that you were too damaged to meet the potential I believed you held
To walk away when you abandoned me again and again for
alcohol
drugs
sex
attention
I loved you quietly and carefully with all the room you wanted and more
And you injured and humiliated me loudly and publicly and repeatedly
You'd say "I'm sorry" and act contrite
Tell me you loved me and ask me not to leave
And I stayed
Every
Time
Eventually "I'm sorry" became "Fuck you"
You railed that I was one thousand ways of not enough
And when your abuse of me was painted as my own fault
I believed it
I believed it because it was
It was because I didn't leave
Over and over
Days
Years
Decades
I stayed
You would whisper I love you in the morning
Curse my name, my family and my gender in the afternoon
And fuck me at night in your urgent, singular, drug-hazed version of "love making"
Until you felt better and I felt used
And I'd cry
Hurt
Helpless
Confused
Wondering what I was missing
Wondering what I needed to do to fix our brokenness
Wondering why I was beautiful when you were feeling good
Then a vicious, scheming, calculated villain when you didn't get what you liked or wanted
Unable to receive basic respect from you who was supposed to be "my person"
Any boundary a crime because it was my job to be what you needed exactly when you needed it
And if I wanted something different there would be hell to pay
If not now, then when your discontent and dis-regulation overflowed its tiny containment
And every perceived wrong ran from your mouth like rabid froth
Hurting more than any physical blow
Because I loved you
And all the things I did to prove that to you weren't enough
I did all that I could to be what you needed
And my trying to salvage the bits of me that survived by saying, "No" or "I don't want to"
This affronted you
I burned for it
I often wondered what was motivated by poor mental health and what was just you
I'm sure the reality is there is some intersection of both somewhere
But there is no solace
No reason or justification makes how you've treated me okay
Who else would have endured your storms and torment the way I did
Who else will
Those who had the luxury to remove themselves from your volatile orbit have
And I envy them
Our children mean that I will always have to remain close enough to you to risk burning
No matter our actual proximity
I have forgotten who I am
I have abandoned myself to try to fill the holes in you created by others
A task that I now understand to be a herculean effort and I am merely mortal
And I have suffered in the place of your abusers because I was the one who chose to stay
Who chose to reflect love through loyalty and support both emotional and financial
But I am devastated now
I am a wraith
Embers and ash
Burned up and burned out
I cannot run this marathon any longer
I love you and I cannot endure you any longer
Or I will disappear completely in your flames
I want more
I want our children to have more
I want to give them more
More joy
More light
More laughter
More kind words
More love from a mother who is happy if not also contented
And I cannot give them this while I'm submerged beneath the shadow of your pain and suffering
And I am sorry that I cannot continue to wait for a healing that is so very slow to come
I tried
But the time has come for me to heal from you
-gws
I didn't need to have a reason But I did The reason I avoided that place Was you Was me Was us You see That was the place you decided that Us ceased to be That was the place where I returned to being just me The place where your voice Was replaced by the sound of slowly cracking glass As my heart shattered in my chest Your eyes pitied me While your lips spilled more Shattered glass to fill my roaring ears I forgot how to breathe And my now shattered heart forgot how to beat And your eyes pleaded with me Because you were already gone You had dismantled us Placed the pieces into a shoebox And buried me alive in a shallow grave I love you-s replaced by I'm sorry-s Those brown eyes indeed sorrowful As my soul was felled by a thousand surgical cuts Sundering two halves into two less-than wholes I just wanted you to stop talking To stop looking at me that way To stop tearing down my world Then you left And I stayed I didn't need to have a reason to avoid that place But I did
Because my mama loves me no matter how far away we are, or how frequently we talk
Because my mama loves me no matter how old I get, or how many babies I’ve had
Because my mama loves me no matter how capable or incapable I perceive myself to be
Because my mama loves me no matter how broke I am or successful I become
Because my mama loves me no matter how little or how much I love myself
Because my mama loves me..."more, most, to the moon and back, and to infinity and beyond"
Because my mama will always love her baby girl like the day she learned she carried my spark, and will beyond when our sparks rejoin the stars
Because I love my mama I will treat every check in like a hug
Because I love my mama I will treat every worry like a kiss
Because I love my mama I will treat every conversation as a gift
Because I love my mama I will treat every gift as a treasure
Because I love my mama I will not take any second of her love for me for granted
Because I will always love my mama I will love her like the day my spark took root inside of her, and will beyond when our sparks rejoin the stars
-gws
I think we are strangers
I want to love you, but I don't know who you are
Do you know?
It's hard to love someone you don't know
You don't seem to know who I am
Do you really want to?
We continue to dance in circles
But never to the same tune
All stomped on toes
And elbows to the ribs
Frustrated and blaming the other
Our sketches of the other
Horrific distortions
Each of us unrecognizable
In the images we hold up to each other
Like a horrible collaboration of Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall
We speak to each other in discordant tones
Two different conversations occurring in the same time and space
Cacophonous and dissonate
Everything lost in translation
-gws
Where are the love song sentiments The reluctant partings The needful longings The passionate reunions The soul worshiping The celebration of every tiny quirk or trait The promises of lifetime comfort The celebrations of loving someone as they are For exactly who and what they are
The love songs lied and now all end in tears One day, who you are will not be who they want you to be And the same will be true as you look at them There will be no celebration And you will wonder if there ever really was I don't think there ever was
I think I was what was supposed to happen Chosen to be cast in a role because I showed up to the audition And no one else was qualified for the role I learned the lines and the choreography And it was good enough for a time But good enough only gets you by for a time
I thought I really earned the part That I embodied the role That compliments were sincere That the applause was genuine But the flowers stopped coming at the end of the show
The costumes no longer fit The auditorium is empty Or worse, filled with disappointment and resentment But I cannot remove the makeup No matter how hard I scrub And I cannot leave the stage Because the show must go on So I repeat the same steps on the worn floor The soulless smile failing to light my eyes Enduring until the music ends
Words Wishes and Wisdom 