Rosalind Guy's Blog, page 24

Crossed Wires, Crossed Lives

I usually try to avoid posting twice in one day, but, eh, what the hell?

There’s a world of difference between loving a person and valuing them. I could value your contributions to an overall effort without loving you. And I can love you because I do, without necessarily valuing you because maybe there’s some part of you I disagree with. Either way, there’s a difference between the two.

I read an article last week, one of those first-person point of view articles, where a man discussed why a man will leave a woman he loves. The most important thing, the author wrote, was value. A man has to see value for you in his life. That stuck with me because I came to this conclusion a while ago about romantic relationships, period. To make a long story short, I was in a relationship with a person who loved me but did not value me. So, he liked having me around but he didn’t give a damn about necessarily keeping me around. This caused us to have many arguments about the same thing over and over again. My most embarrassing moment from that relationship involved us playing bits of songs for each other. I chose songs that were about real love and commitment and, well, he chose songs about differences and how sometimes they can be too much to overcome. In other words, I was arguing for our relationship and he was arguing against it. Sadly, I didn’t leave after that. But, thankfully, I did eventually. And in one of those “I see you Universe” twist of fates, he claimed to see value in me after I left him and wanted me to give him another chance. I couldn’t though because I didn’t see him the same. I wasn’t willing to fight for us anymore. I’d fought so long alone that I was worn out.

Madea said it best when she said, we mess up when we commit to people we never were intended to be with. We earn our badges of honor, going through the fires of hell alone, with someone who could take us or leave us. So, I’ve been meditating today on the way lives cross and wires cross creating chaos in the place where love was once thought to reside and came up with the poetic exchange below. Of course, the Mysterious Poet Dude contributed his two cents.

He said:

I’d never hurt you

She said:

You’re hurting me now.

He said:

Pain ignites your Hope.

She said:

Pain steals my Hope.

He said:

Hope denies death by blind Faith.

She said:

But you’re hurting me still.

He said:

I hope you’re happy because

you are the magic

in which I believe.

She said:

I looked at you & saw magic

I had no idea your greatest act

would be to Disappear.

He said:

When a person shows you

who they are, believe them.

Where am I now?

Lost within a thought of what

could’ve been, trying to catch

up to what’s losing me.

She said:

My soul reached out to you, tried

to hold you, was confused when you

turned away. What else could I do

but turn away too?

He said:

Love is our chaos. Chaos is

our life. What is normal? Btw

who came up with that word in the

first place? Are any of us normal?

Or should we just call everyone chaos?

She said:

Loving you was never chaos because

it was so easy to do. Loving you

gave my heart reason to beat, my

words reason to be spoken, my eyes

a reason to see.

He said:

And the hurt you feel now

is not from the Love thief.

It’s hurt that comes from your very

existence, gives you the ability to pour

your vivid soul into the pool of life

as you live to speak about your

intimate experience with a love searching

to be shared while constantly being

disrupted by the timekeeper of your insanity.

She said:

Could this be an illusion then, the

vision I see of the timekeeper of insanity

strangling me, leaving me struggling to

breathe and wondering if time is running

out for me?

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

P.S. Hug someone you love tonight and let them know you love them. Tomorrow is not promised to any of us though we always like to live like we have forever. Do it for me, okay? Okay.

Trying to Find My Voice–Again

I told you that you were hurting me

You told me stop trying to scream

I yelled out for you to see

what you were doing to me; you turned away

and kept your grip tight on my neck.

I asked you to love me so you’d stop hurting me

You told me to be quiet; you kept trying to silence

me. When I couldn’t stop screaming,

you finally tied the noose around my neck

and killed me.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Phone Call From Heaven

I saved all of your voice mails

every one of them. So even though

you’re gone I still get to hear your voice.

My mailbox is full and no one

can leave messages because

I knew one day I’d have to live without you

and I wanted to hold onto some part of you.

The messages that make me miss you

the most are the ones

where you don’t even say anything

about loving me. But when you called

just to tell me not to forget to get

milk from the grocery store or to remind me

that you’d be running late for dinner.

They say it’s the little things you miss most

and they were right. I miss all the little things

about you. Your smell, your smile, your touch.

Sometimes I crawl into the back of my closet

and with all the lights turned off

I hold the phone up to my ear

listening for your voice as you speak to me

from heaven. Did you know all along

that one day all I’d have would be your voice?

But then again, how could you have known?

I don’t know. I just know I’m lost without you.

I always tell myself

This time I won’t cry

but the tears begin to fall

long before your voice stops talking

to me. Sometimes I fall asleep

lying on the floor in my closet

where my dreams allow me

to visualize your face while I

listen to your voice talking to me.

I know the voice mails won’t last forever,

nothing ever really does; so one day they’ll be gone

just like you are. You never fully get over losing someone

you once truly loved. You just learn to live despite

their absence and despite the hole in your heart

and in your life. And always you pray that one day

you’ll finally receive a phone call from heaven.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Little Black Boy

My soul is heavy with grief right now. I can hardly express with words how I feel right now. An eight-year-old boy has had his life altered forever because he was left alone in a house with small kids, supposedly to take care of them, when someone should have been taking care of him. Now, he’s charged with murder and the adult is charged with manslaughter. Go figure. A child is forced to bear the responsibility for an adult’s irresponsibility and neglect. A nine-year-old boy is assassinated. Shot in the face. His only crime: being a black little boy in a city that values violence over all things. We will shoot each other over the stupidest things, steal another person’s life as if though we have a right. And no one bats an eye anymore. We’ve gotten used to it. It’s expected. Some people even have the audacity to justify it.

I am grief-stricken because I would take these little boys and love them. If it were possible, I would take them all in and love them.

I’m tired of reading about the misdeeds committed against black little boys and girls. These are children. They deserve to have the opportunity to be children. Shame on it all that they are being dragged into the nonsensical world of so-called adults. And shame on it all that we aren’t outraged.

Little black boy

Pardon me, while I offer you a

cliché: I need you to know

I’ve cried a river of tears for you.

It seems like every time I watch the news

someone is butchering black little boys’ lives

leaving behind corpses and criminals

where there should be future black men.

And all I can offer is my tears and my words,

words that are filling up my too heavy soul.

If my words meant anything or

held any real value

I would trade in all my words,

cash in on their value to try and save you.

Maybe then my soul wouldn’t feel so heavy.

With the proceeds from my not-so-valuable

words, I’d build a place for me and you.

A place where I, like Mother Earth,

would give birth to a love for you, a love

that no amount of #wedontreallymattter

could destroy. But if somehow my love

was butchered too, I’d re-birth my love for you.

I love you. That’s all I have to offer you.

And these are not just valueless words.

I can’t keep reading about what’s happening

to you without wondering where we went wrong.

Who injected our collective soul with poison so strong

that we nonchalantly are destroying our own?

Do you not realize we’re destroying our own roots?

Put the ax down and lift up each other.

Where is the outrage that should follow

the cold-blooded assassination of a nine year old boy

who’s only crime was being a child?

Cowards live among us, destroying us from the roots on up,

swinging their dicks while holding a gun in their hands.

Their manhood engraved on the tiny head

of a bullet used to steal away the life of

someone who looks like you, who looks like me.

Who looks like the one who’s butchering little black boys.

And I’m tired.

When did it become a cool thing to do,

to destroy your own son or daughter’s childhood?

When did it become acceptable to

place eight year old boys at the head of a family?

Little boys live in the world of pretend and fantasy.

They don’t realize that their actions can literally

end a life. But you should’ve known.

You should’ve known better. I don’t know who to blame.

Is it a culture of babies having babies or

a culture of #blacklivesdontmatter to me

because they don’t matter to you?

I’m tired of trying to understand you.

I have tried to love you, but how can I love you

when I don’t understand you? Who can I blame

for the way you are? Where do you find the audacity

to take the purest of love that’s been offered to you

and take it for granted by pretending it doesn’t matter?

Something inside of you should have told you

not to leave. But you did. That love didn’t mean a thing to you.

Do you find the audacity to take this love for granted

in the bottom of a bottle of cheap ass liquor or mixed in with

the white lines spread across the table that should be

covered with dinner? Do you find it beneath the propaganda

and lies that tell you that all black women

are either welfare queens, trap queens, bitches or whores?

Do you find the audacity to cut off the roots of the ones

who love you by standing in front of a playhouse mirror

one that distorts images of those who love you unconditionally

and makes you see an enemy where you should see

the one who loves you? I’m tired.

Loving you has become so heavy, but black boy,

please know that I will never stop loving you.

I will never give up on you. I will give birth

to a love for you that I hope will make you realize

that you do matter. To me. And even when it

seems that I’m loving in vain, I will continue to love you.

At some point we have to take responsibility

for the lovelessness that’s destroying us.

I keep offering my words of truth

trying to get you to see the value in loving you.

I love you. I know it’s hard for you to see

when your vision is clouded by such misery.

I’m tired of crying for you. I want to love you.

I do love you. But that never seems to be enough.

Black boy, please know I will continue to love you

and to fight for you even when it seems loving you

is breaking me. I carry these words and these tears

in my heavy and burdened soul, hoping that one day

you’ll love me in return and we can get back to

how it used to be.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

* Dedicated to nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee and the unnamed eight year old boy in Birmingham, AL who was recently charged with murder. And to all the other babies who have been sucked into this nasty cycle of violence perpetrated by so-called adults,the ones who are supposed to love and protect them.

You Promised It Wouldn’t Hurt

Little Suzy plays a game with her “uncle”

It’s a game he once told her wouldn’t hurt her

But when she shrieked from his forceful

entering her, he told her it wouldn’t last very long.

I know it hurts now, but soon it won’t hurt anymore.

His hot musty breath stroked the outer edges of her ear

while his fingers, covered in the grime of his sin,

forced their way inside of her. She yelled out again

and he took that grimy hand and used it to cover her

mouth. The breath escaped her as he forced his way

inside of her. It was a game they played over and over

again. Every game has a tag line, something repeated

to return you to the memory. Like Little Sally Walker

or Tag, you’re it. For Suzy and her uncle, it was

Scream again and I’ll kill your mother or

You know you like it; I can tell. Suzy is no longer

a little girl, but she can still feel her uncle’s musty breath

up against her ear. Her husband doesn’t understand,

thinks her rejection makes him less a man.

All Suzy can focus on is the words of the song

that she’s forced to hear again and again:

You know you like it; I can tell and

Scream again and I’ll kill your mother.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Was It All Just a Dream?

This morning I woke up early, early meaning it was still dark outside. And, you know, with Daylight Savings Time, it’s light out around 6 a.m. So, yeah, for a Sunday, that’s early. But I was having a dream, really more like a nightmare. And, the funny thing about it, it was one of those dreams I chose to just wake up from. (I’ll explain this later.)

The dream took place in a school, I’m assuming the school where I work. I was in a classroom and looked up. This man was standing in the window. He was an older looking black man, with a scruffy looking beard, wearing a grey oversized jacket and holding a knife in his hand. He’d been standing there waiting on me to look up so he could hold the knife up for me to see, a nonverbal threat to me.

Fear surged through my body. I remember feeling like if I didn’t get away, I was going to die. So, of course, I tried to escape, only I couldn’t run fast enough. I opened my mouth to scream, to call out for someone to help me and no sound came out. Every time I opened my mouth to scream, no words escaped through my lips. I’d lost my voice.

So, I just woke up. I sat up in bed and decided not to go back to sleep. I graded a paper or two (I keep them on the bed where my writing notebooks used to be), read a few more pages of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings. I eventually got up and cleaned the kitchen, checked the pot roast I’d left in the slow cooker over night; I did everything but think about that dream. I didn’t want to think about that dream.

But then while I was driving my daughter to work, I found myself puttering around in my head. Was it just a dream, I asked myself. Or something more. And I started thinking about how I feel like I’ve lost my voice. In many areas of my life, I have no voice. At least that’s how I feel. I have been unhappy with certain things taking place in my life for a while, but I feel helpless, like I can’t change. For instance, I can’t just quit my job. What I can do and have been doing is lying in bed every morning dreading the fact that I have to go back through the doors of that school. Wondering how so much can change in a year’s time. I used to love going to work. But when you have an attorney running a school district and a new principal who doesn’t know his staff or students and shows no interest in getting to know them, a school where parental involvement means missing every parent meeting, coming up to the school only to clear suspensions, and coming up to the school to threaten and call out a teacher despite the fact that your child is consistently late, consistently does not complete assignments and doesn’t seem to have any interest in learning…and then to top it all off, after you’ve created a scene, cursed said teacher out, the principal somehow manages to take the parent’s side and throw the teacher under the bus. Yeah, that’s the type of place that make some people feel as if though they are suffocating. Because it always has to be the teacher’s fault, right? It has to be my fault. And, that, well that’s just one example of the unhappiness I’m currently feeling. I feel like I’m stuck in a muddy puddle that smells like shit but that’s weighing me down like quicksand. I’ve been yelling out and no one has heard me. And, so now, I feel like I have no voice.

By the time I’d dropped my daughter off and made it back home, I was trying to compose a poem to explain how I feel, but all I saw was a blank sheet of paper. The white sheet of paper, I guess, is a symbol for my silence. I have no words. I have only the feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. I feel stuck and I can’t even yell out.

Since I couldn’t come up with the words to express how I feel, Langston Hughes’ poem came to me:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

And, I also have an answer to my question. No. No, it’s not all a dream. But even though I was able to just choose to wake up and distract myself with other things this morning, I don’t seem to be able to wake up like that in my own life. Even if I could, who would really hear me?

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Fallen Leaves

I had a wonderful opportunity to be broken down this week. I attended a writing workshop at the college where I work. One of the creative writing instructors invited in writer, Vu Tran, author of the newly-released Dragonfish (another book that’s been added to my TBR list). Tran read the stories of the four of us who attended the workshop and gave us helpful comments about how we could fix the short stories we’d submitted in advance of the workshop.

The experience reminded me how valuable it is to belong to a writing group. It’s really helpful to have someone read and offer comments for making your writing better. As an English and Developmental Writing teacher, I do this often for my students. But it’s been a while since it happened to me. I would like to have a small group of dedicated writers in the area that I could work with.

I have to admit though that, immediately following the workshop, I was disappointed. Tran didn’t read my story and gush about what a wonderful writer I was like I’d imagined he would. Instead, he offered constructive criticism. But I haven’t heard constructive criticism in a while. It’s been several years since I’ve been workshopped. So, I left feeling dejected. I missed the positive things he said. I mean it. I literally missed the positive words because I was lost in the feeling of dejectedness. Luckily, he handed out typewritten copies of his comments. So, I have the opportunity to read, “A very intriguing portrait of a woman so heartbroken over her son’s death that she’s now gone crazy…”

I can’t allow myself to get hung up on the positive feedback I received though because I want to be better. And by better, I mean, to so immerse the reader in my main character’s mind that they feel like they’re going crazy with her. This was one of the things I got the opportunity to discuss with Tran and the other writers who were present that day. This, I believe, is a true test of a writer. Will I be the type of writer who can take criticism and use it to make my work better or the one who takes criticism and allows it to cause me to simply shut down. All artists are doubtful of their talent. It’s the nature of the beast. But I’m going to choose to make my story better. Because, hey, when a New York Times bestselling novelist tells you how to make your story better, you’d be a fool not to take his advice. And, I’m no fool. So, today has been set aside for me to use those helpful comments to revise “Time Keeper of Insanity.”

And here’s my poem for the day:

The trees sway and the stars shine

but they do not heed my voice.

My soul cries out to the universe

but my unspoken words fall back to earth,

rain that helps to shake loose the leaves

from their trees.

Trees lose their leaves in the fall,

choosing to defy the most natural state

of not changing, a place

where all things remain the same.

They do not own fears,

tremulously holding onto leaves

that have already started to die.

Because they are willing to let go

the ground becomes a palette,

a painting expressed with

beautiful fallen leaves.

A pile of fallen leaves

is a place where children

can fall and feel safe and free

their light-hearted laughter

rising to the surface of the soul

to eventually be scattered to the wind

with all those fallen leaves.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Originally posted on A Writer's Thoughts:

Brother, can you spare a dime?

I don’t mean money

I’m talking about time.

Can you give me ten minutes

to remember why I rose in love

with you? Do you have just ten minutes

so I can skinny dip in your soul?

I want to get naked with you.

I want to hold you near me

without feeling you pulling away,

ready to move on to the next big thing.

I want to bare my soul for you

knowing that I won’t be naked alone.

I long to wrap my body and mind

in the gauzy fabric of your words.

I long to step fully

immersing myself totally in your love.

I heard a rumor,

something whispered through the grapevine

that you love me. Yet that doesn’t keep me

from longing to be carried away

to feel my soul shiver

the way my body shivers when you touch me.

View original 180 more words

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Brother, can you spare a dime?

I don’t mean money

I’m talking about time.

Can you give me ten minutes

to remember why I rose in love

with you? Do you have just ten minutes

so I can skinny dip in your soul?

I want to get naked with you.

I want to hold you near me

without feeling you pulling away,

ready to move on to the next big thing.

I want to bare my soul for you

knowing that I won’t be naked alone.

I long to wrap my body and mind

in the gauzy fabric of your words.

I long to step fully

immersing myself totally in your love.

I heard a rumor,

something whispered through the grapevine

that you love me. Yet that doesn’t keep me

from longing to be carried away

to feel my soul shiver

the way my body shivers when you touch me.

I wish I could thread together your promises

to create one dime, a ten-minute block of time

that will belong only to me, where I don’t

have to worry about who’s coming next

and who came before. Mostly,

I just want to take my heart off pause

so I can feel loved by you again.

We used to swim in each other’s words

and now I’m drowning.

How can you save me or protect me

when you’re the one killing me?

How can you promise tomorrow

while stealing away today?

I still remember the first time

you told me

I love you….more.

It sounded like a recycled love song

but something about the look in your eyes

told me I could trust you

to not just remix, but re-make

that old tune. I knew your feelings were

genuine

But lately these blurred lines

have caused more tears in my eyes and

more fear in my heart

because in the gigantic river of my feelings

the only one that feels true

is that I’m finally losing you.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Giving Birth to Goodbye

Some people spend years trying to

say good-bye, leaving behind a trail

of half-finished good-byes, seemingly

unaware or unconcerned about

how those heavy stones will feel when you

carry them in your soul, holding them

in your womb and waiting to give birth

to the loss that you knew was yours all along.

They don’t realize you heard the first good-bye

shortly after they uttered the first hello.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

*Photo courtesy of gettyimages