Baby

Baby,

I feel like I am

On a spinning top

And I can’t stop,

And the only thing that keeps my focus

Are your eyes.

 

The calm nights

Of dancing in your kitchen,

Magic upon my fingertips.

So in love that the

Other world

Ceased to exist,

And you were able

To kiss away those

Little fears.

 

Baby,

I am a child sitting

On the merry go round

And I want to stand up

And hang from the pole

With just one hand,

But the fear

Is that I may fall.

And the only thing that keeps my focus

Are your eyes.

 

You would take your finger,

And draw upon

My back,

A little game of feel

What I have

Written upon

Your skin.

 

Baby,

The Ferris wheel

Has stopped,

And I am stuck at the top

As your eyes

Watch mine saying

One thousand things

And it’s in that moment

That I know,

And you turn and walk

Away.

 

Baby,

Your eyes have left my soul.

Your fingers no longer drawing

Upon my naked back,

And I am spinning out of control

Stuck somewhere in middle

Without you.

Done

When I met you I was done.

Done with all the one night stands.

Done with the running away,

The late nights scanning rooms

For something sweet.

When I met you I was done.

I thought I had found the one,

The man I would spend the rest of my life with.

 

 

So now,

The tears that overwhelm,

The darkness in my heart

The feeling that I have somehow sold out,

Have given way

To everything that was once

Done.

 

How I mend the wounds you caused,

The damage upon my skin,

Is not your choice any more.

You could have had everything,

And yet,

It was just as near as it was

Far away.

 

When I met you I was done.

Done with all the one night stands.

Done with the running away,

The late nights scanning rooms

For something sweet.

When I met you I was done.

I thought I had found the one,

The man I would spend the rest of my life with.

My mistake

I used to believe that you were my favourite mistake. That no matter how shit you made me feel about myself that it didn’t matter. You were my favourite mistake. And I missed the slow nights when we danced around your kitchen. You were my mistake. My shining light. The light that woke me up from one thousand years of slumber. I thought, I thought you were it, but now, months later, to see nothing has changed, you are still the same. You have not grown. You have not learnt, you still waste away your time, day after day. Well now, now I get it. you were just my mistake.

Greatness

You don’t think this is going to happen to you. I mean when you’re a child, you have these thoughts, ideas and plans about the future. About the kind of person you are going to grow into. The kind of man or woman you will marry and the life you will have together. You have plans of greatness and you know, you just know that when you grow up, you’re going to be great. I did. I thought I was going to be full of greatness, and be successful and happily married. I really thought that by the time I turned twenty five (cause that was just so old when you’re a child) that I was going to be someone. The thing is though; it never turned out that way.

 

I’m none of the things I thought I might be when I was a child and instead I have managed to end up here. In this space where I’m neither happy nor unhappy, I am instead content. I am content with my life, with my existence in this world. And yes, of course there are still so many things I wish I had of done when I was younger, just hanging onto those childish dreams. But it never happened that way for me. By the time I was twenty five, I was nothing but unhappy. I was in an abusive relationship and in a job I hated. I had managed to alienate everyone in my entire life except for my partner, who had managed to alienate himself from me. I know, in hindsight that the only thing I ever had to be by the time I turned twenty five was myself, and yet even now, at nearly thirty, I’m not really sure of who that is anymore.

 

So what happened to shatter those dreams, those plans of a wonderful life filled with greatness? Life. Life happened to me when I was four years old. Life happened to me before I was even able to comprehend what it was that was happening to me, and in one moment in a darkened room, those dreams of greatness were shattered and left for dead; covered instead by the smell of whiskey and smoke.

 

The problem with having your innocence revoked at such a young age is that you don’t even know what has happened to you. Why you hurt in places you shouldn’t and why you feel isolated from the rest of the world. You don’t understand why the words are trapped within your throat unable to erupt from your vocal chords, so instead you try to cope as best you can, and everything becomes internalised. You tell yourself that if you were just a little bigger, a little stronger, perhaps you could have stopped what was happening. You tell yourself it is OK now, you are home and you are safe, but you remind yourself every day that this is your own dirty little secret which will never be told. You can actually even convince yourself that this never even happened. It was instead just a really bad nightmare. And the nightmares you have afterwards, well they were the result of something other than the rape. So you make up a story to cope with the recurring nightmares, and you tell yourself this is how it is over and over again, until you believe it, until you no longer know what really happened or what it was you made up in your own mind to cope.

 

I was twenty six when I was actually able to pull these memories, these nightmares out into the open. It took me twenty two years to be able to admit what happened to me when I was four years old. And I wonder now, if it had not taken me so long to speak out, would things have been different for me? Would I have been able to capture just a little bit of that greatness I had dreamed of as a child? I guess it does not really matter now. The past four years have been a learning curve; the past four years have actually been the biggest learning curve of my life. I’ve learnt that I feel I need to be perfect in order to be loved. That I run away from relationships because I am unable to control the feeling of love. I have learnt that I seem to think it is OK to harm myself when I am in pain.

 

So what do I do now? Well, I think, in order to capture just a little bit of that greatness, I must learn to overcome the things I do. I no longer need to be perfect in order to love myself or to be loved by another. I am adequate for all situations and I do not need to run away from something that resembles love, but most importantly, I can’t control how other people feel about me. I can’t control their reactions and I can not control the pain they may or may not inflict upon me, so do I really need to punish myself by harming myself to cope? I think that greatness is not so much about those dreams you had as a child, but perhaps, greatness is actually being able to survive. You can get over anything; all you have to do is survive first.

Touched

Fingertips tracing soft

Curves

Leaving a trail of goose flesh

In their wake –

No space left untouched

From the silky touch.

Across arms,

Over bumps

And falling into

Each hallow crevice .

The touch-

The human contact-

The moment of

Being

Touched

Alive.

 

Dreamless state

The aloneness has become my addiction,

My drug to keep me safe and warm

Within the isolated walls of my own mind

Nothing can touch me here,

And everything has its place

Here in my apartment

On any given day,

Nothing moves.

 

But it is my choice,

To stay here

In this dreamless state.

And there is nothing,

Nothing that could take me away,

For it is my choice

To stay in my own place.

 

I’m a junkie,

Coming down

From my last high.

My skin crawls, and my fingers reach

For another cigarette

And I drown within the wine.

 

But it is my choice,

To stay here

In this dreamless state.

And there is nothing,

Nothing that could take me away,

For it is my choice

To stay in my own place.

 

The nights,

They roll on endlessly,

My eyes drifting into space.

I sit listlessly,

And like an accident

You can not turn away.

 

 But it is my choice,

To stay here

In this dreamless state.

And there is nothing,

Nothing that could take me away,

For it is my choice

To stay in my own place.

Passed over

The day was purple –

Bruised –

And full like a swelling

Grape

Begging to be crushed

Into

Wine.

And your hands

Gently place themselves

Around the smallness

Of my heart

Sheltering it from all pain

And weather.

I was held,

Transfixed

Only by your eyes on

Mine

As you pushed me

Softly

Onto the warmth of

Your unmade bed…

And your pierced my

Flesh

Revealing

A light so bright

I wondered if perhaps

I had

Passed over.

My gift for the day

You never realise what it is you’ve let go until you find yourself in a moment remembering how it once was between the two of you. I was on the bus coming home this afternoon and the lady next to me kept receiving text messages, and she would read them and smile. I was curious, so I read them out of the corner of my eye, and her replies, and I realised then that she was having a dirty sms conversation with someone. I found myself smiling, remembering the beginning of a relationship when everything was fresh and new and each new day would bring a new discovery, and I realised it has been so long since I felt that rush of excitement. That feeling of butterflies in your stomach. And as I watched her reply, she seemed to linger so long before hitting the send button, like she was reading over the message time and time again to see if she had said too much or not enough. It was such a beautiful thing to witness. Fresh love, lust, the desire, the wanton disregard of where she was when she typed in wet, wet, wet into her mobile phone.

I felt like an intruder in her secret love life. A watcher and she was a doer. But I had never noticed how wonderful it is to see someone so filled with hope and admiration for a situation or another human being. To enable yourself to be so wrapped up in another person that just the thought of them makes you smile. It was the most beautiful thing I have seen in so long, and I missed it. I missed the way your heart skips a beat when you see you’ve received a message from them, the way you hit open so fast and you always have to read the message a second time, well, because the first time you were just so damn excited to have heard from them. I miss love. I miss wanting someone else, and I miss the way it feels to be so safe inside the soft cocoon that encompasses you both that the outside world ceases to exist.

But for the first time, I saw it in all its beauty and wonder rather than jealousy and detest for something I did not have myself. To see another person that happy, made something inside me yearn for something more, something better, and it was my amazing gift for the day.

Smile

You take her hand to hold

When she is cold,

And walk along the sidewalk

Taking photographs across the street.

But she never smiles

Into your camera,

But her eyes

Wander past the lens and tell you

The story you want

To be told.

 

In the silence

You tell her it is alright to frown,

And that the sun will come

And find her

Once again.

 

Years have passed and you’ve held

Her hand through all

her darkness, fear and pain.

She meets you at the altar

And again she takes your hand,

But the smile never returned to her

Face

And it is still her eyes

That hold you

In this space.

 

In the silence

You tell her it is alright to frown,

And that the sun will come

And find her

Once again.

 

Across the shore

Her hand in yours

She is wearing the dress she made

To hide her knees.

And her belly swells

As she builds your family in her womb;

And you still smile for the both

Of you.

But her eyes

Tell you the story you want

To be told.

 

In the silence

You tell her it is alright to frown,

And that the sun will come

And find her

Once again.

 

You look back

At those photographs

With your daughter on your knee.

These are now the

Only hands you have

To hold

Her mother wandered

From this world so long

Ago.

And while on your knee she wants to know

Why she never smiled

In the photographs;

And you tell her you don’t know.

 

Now in the silence

You watch a motherless child

Fall asleep.

Not the man you used to

Be.

And in the silence

You don’t complain,

Instead you turn your back

On your heart that breaks

And

Smile for the wife you used to

Know.

There’s no place like home

Do you remember the part in the Wizard of Oz, right at the end when Dorothy realises that there is no place like home? That profound moment when she declares that she needn’t go off to some far away land looking for something that she already had… when she realises she doesn’t need to look any further than her own backyard? Do you remember that? I had forgotten this. All my life I have been looking everywhere else for love. I expected love would be this massive, overwhelming experience and that I would know straight from the start that this was love. But perhaps love doesn’t need to be this way. Perhaps love is something that is much softer and more familiar. I’ve looked for someone to take me away from everything that has taken place in my life, and I wanted to go somewhere far, far away from everything that I believed to be shackle me here. But the truth is… it isn’t go to be any better or more wonderful elsewhere than it is for me right here. 

I am loved by so many people, and yes, perhaps there is not one man who loves me, but I’ve come to realise that unless I can love all the things about me, no one else is going to be able to. So, sometimes I do run away. Sometimes I freak out, but that is just who I am. And I no longer need to see this as a negative, I no longer need to force things that are un natural because if it needs to be forced then it isn’t love, nor will it ever be love.

I think perhaps I have allowed myself to fall in love with the idea of love. With the idea that there is someone who wants to love only me, and yet in doing this, I’ve jaded myself from the true meaning of love. Love does not walk away because you’ve changed your mind or you’ve decided to focus on the things you need to do here before you take some massive leap of faith. I’ve been accused of cutting the flowers before they’ve grown, and perhaps I have, but love, love has to begin with yourself first. If I can not learn to let my own love grow here, surrounded and loved by things and people who are familiar to me, it will be wasted. The scenery, no matter how far away will have been the only thing that would have changed. I would have still ran. 

My new years resolution to be kinder to myself is working. I’m beginning to feel something I don’t ever think I’ve felt for myself in my entire life; respect. I have begun to respect the person I am, and I’ve been able to do this on my own.  i did not need to run away from everything in my life here to do it, and I think if I had of, I would have still been the same. I would not have changed anything.

Love will find me, when it is ready and when I am ready and I have this feeling that it isn’t going to be this overwhelming thunderbolt of lust… because that is what makes me run. It’s just going to happen and it is going to happen so softly, I won’t even notice, until, one day, one day when I wake up and realise that I never needed to look any further than my own backyard.