Anarkhos

You have broken my heart. You said "don't go; don't love me and leave me" and pulled me close to sleep and my insides were like melting caramel and I stayed. I expect nothing of you now; admit only in the pining early hours that I want need crave you still - and suppressed; my vivid dreams remind me why oh why it is you and only you that haunts me. And when I hear your voice, your foreign accent familiar as home, calling me back across the years in dreams I do not wish for freedom but to step through time to you.  

I I traded everything I had for cheap wine, quick sex, dirty sheets and sleazy secrets. Those nights we doubled back and met on the bus out of town and those mornings I turned my newly oiled latch to let you out. There were not enough, it was not worth the cost. II I sit alone at the very back of the top deck of the last bus and I think it's been two years since I last had to try for a guy and maybe I forgot how, maybe - but you do not want me to try, just to be there when you get bored. III To be fair to you; you warned me, and said I do not care and I am a shit and loads of people hate me there because I treat wom

Daring, shocking, out of control. Throwing men out at five in the morning so the sheets are washed and warm and dry on the bed for the boyfriend in the evening. Tops cut down to here and skirts up to there so no drink has to come from your bank account and cruelty as a currency, unrehearsed, scathing put-downs that cut deeply and everyone says "you're funny - not many pretty girls are so funny" and lies that come so easily "oh god it was awful - he was so drunk I had to put him to bed" and then "I wish you were here" Adding up the numbers, it isn't worth it and yet you convince yourself it is. You're alive, you're wanted, you

It's always being uncertain because you are always what if, and I could have you if I wanted you. It's the fact that when everybody taught me to say no, no one ever thought to mention that I wouldn't want to. It's that we never even tried, but there's so much evidence we would have been perfect. It's that you could be the One but you're just someone I used to know. It's that I'm a good middle class girl with matching crockery and a milk jug and cookie cutters and you slice through that to the heart. It's that we make our own fairytales and you were never in mine and here I am, here I am, in withdrawal addicted obscene thro

Your phone bills are smaller now, with no long distance calls to make, and your car insurance reduced to reflect lower mileage and all those journeys not made, those roads not taken, those lanes that you know like the back of your hand - Left, right, straight ahead, right, right - are no longer driven.  You did not see the bluebells wake and spring burst forth in the countryside, did not see the snow on the fields, cold horses in their   quilted coats pawing, nibbling, pawing. Christmas stamps still tucked in your wallet, unused, and fountain pens dried up next to watermarked John Lewis writing paper with no letters left to wr

I sit in the waiting room and feel blank. Once; forever ago, eleven months seventeen days ago, I was whole, I was perfect, I was new, I was careless, I was clueless, and someone hurt me, and another dismissed me, and the damage was done. Now, I am wrong.  I am damaged goods.  I am scarred, and my scars are physical, real, and tug and twist at my body until I weep and weep. I opt out of youth and life and vitality and freedom and spontenaity and lose face, friends, lose out but cannot join in because I am ruined.   I tell no one, give up on the doctor, self medicate, manage.  And f

And they say; to have love like that is the icing on the cake! but they are wrong. Love, such as yours, is the yeast in the dough, because it enables you to grow into everything you are; secure, compassionate, humble and full of grace and joy.  

1. You will not cry demurely in socially acceptable situations. Instead you shall perform the walking howl; and cry hysterically, calm down, and cry, and calm as you try to gather yourself on the way to the station. 2. You will be late for work - you will see the dress you wore last time you saw your lost one - and you will hold it and breathe into it as if maybe just maybe you will smell them or feel them or it will change things and then find you cannot hold it together while wearing it, change, and miss your train. 3. You will find this happens over and over and you buy new things so that they are not 'oh I wore this with

It happened again. One day; something but the next day, not. You were fun, secret, an unrolling spool and now you are not. I shift, restless, and think who next?

I a woman can fracture open under unspeakable violence. skin can tear like the voice can break and go silent. a poet can speak of radical honesty, carefully document a life, and hold a secret without believing she broke her vow, but in the end, to have grace, she can speak the words because another woman stands at her back and only then is she safe to say, yes, there was blood and emotion, but in the end there were fourteen stitches threaded through her animal self that remade a woman who could speak for herself. II a woman can choose to allow her own destruction. her body becomes self-obsessed in an ocean of pain an

she is married to a monster, cleaves unto him in the dark. does she regret her choice, creep away in the night to sit alone by the windows, watch the stars. does she know or even care what those hands, heart, body has done before she knew him, there as the sky lightens toward grey she lashes out at the world, carefully, precisely, knows everyone's secrets but her own.

It's a big deal. Just a weekend, just two days. Just ten weekends. Just until Christmas but I'm still wearing shorts, sitting on the porch. The floor will numb my crumpled legs, I short myself on meds during the week because the need to not feel those days is all I have to hold on to. It's about control, about the hours since those doors slammed behind me, since I got up off that floor, since I held my daughter in my arms. I know you will be there for me, how unfairly you will open your home to chaos, that someone should be lying by your bed until you fall asleep, that those things I took were just things, but they were expression

Rolling your eyes does not count unless you actually see the ceiling like a storm does not count until you see the silver underneath the maple leaves, flashing upwards. Death does not count until you begin to write a letter to the deceased, say is instead of was when you are done with grieving you hear the birds call to each other as night falls, you pull the blankets up to your chin, you sweep the stairs slowly, remember the things you read in a book that has never had its heart broken, feel the loss of grief like a physical wound, beginning again.

You are angry, there are purple flowers on the windowsill, you are angry, the fan hums softly, your limbs are soft against each other, collarbone unfolding like the bow of a violin. There is a power in anger, there is a light burning against your ribs, you cannot speak these words in a known language. There is an escalation in the forming of self, you draw the pieces in a poem, you fit them together like the building of a person, dissect and identify, you write notes in the margin of your fingers, there is a method of bombs bursting against the sky, pictures in the clouds, the world will bend itself around you, you are angry lik