Rosalind Guy's Blog, page 26

My Life in a Crumbling House

I can’t keep pretending

that your detached interest

in creating distance

where it never existed before

is just another way of loving

me. The truth of the matter is

I’m more familiar with seeing

and feeling “not loving me”

so please don’t ask me

to keep trying to see

what doesn’t exist.

The much easier truth,

the one I actually can see

I’ve spent years

chasing a love that

for me

is ill-fitting. And now

I’ve entered my last days

&

I’m no longer willing

to keep chasing

loves that aren’t form-fitting.

I refuse to keep squeezing

into too-little love or oversized love

all the while pretending

it was made just for me.

You had me completely fooled

once

but I’ve been fooled before

my heart burdened

by the transparent lies & disguises

of bag men who pretended

to be men

in love with me.

Truth is

my life is a crumbling house

of decisions played like cards

that never were mine

to begin with.

And now I’m held hostage

in a crumbling house of lies

watching through the bars

as life goes on

and I’m still stuck

believing in fairy tales &

learning to wear

lies that were never meant

to fit me.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

I’ve Fallen in Love with a Ghost

“Dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt; and sing like nobody’s listening.”

We take so much for granted, believing that there’s always be time to do whatever it is that will make us happy. I’ll travel one day. I’ll have a family one day. I’ll fall in love one day. I’ll get a better job one day. I’ll quit my job and do what I really love, one day. But I learned a long time ago that when people offer excuses instead of effort, it’s because someone is trying to get them to do something they don’t want to do. This even goes for things that we may think we want to do. Take my writing, for example, if I spend more time whining about trying to make time and coming up with reasons why I don’t have time, eventually I’d have to answer the difficult question: Do I really want to be a writer? The answer is yes. That’s why I get up early, stay up late, and utilize the few minutes between jobs and other responsibilities. It means that much to me.

I’m working on two novels: writing the outlines for them both. One is a novel I started working on this summer, the other is a short story that I’ve decided will work better as a novel. I’ve spent this entire Fall Break working on both of these, but today I hit a wall. I’m not going to just give up, of course, but I do acknowledge when I hit a wall. And I do something about it. I’m going to watch another lesson for the James Patterson MasterClass I’m taking online (hoping for inspiration) and I’ve been freewriting today. That’s how I came up with the poem below. Hopefully, this will help me get back on track. If not, I still won’t stop. Because it means that much to me.

I never knew you

would end up being a ghost

until I observed you

walking through the walls

surrounding my heart

all the while trying to convince me

you were there to stay

until I looked for you,

tried to find you.

But you had disappeared.

Again.

I never believed I’d fall

in love with a ghost

until I met you.

And I saw how love

was never enough

to keep you around.

I thought it was your soul

I’d fallen in love with.

Silly me. It was just the spirit

of a love that never will be

‘cuz you’ll always be

a ghost

to me, until you can prove

you know how to stay &

when you stop walking through walls

that can easily be torn down.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

P.S. Remember, take nothing for granted and live your life with purpose. (I’m talking to myself as much as you.) And, when you get stuck and need inspiration: “Dance like nobody’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt, and sing like nobody’s listening.)

A Starving Love

Love is poverty

when it forces you

to be something you aren’t.

Starvation is state of constancy

that cannot be relieved

with falling rain. Shame on it all

to the woman girl child who

has not learned what it feels like

to have milk and honey dripping

from her lips.

Poverty can transform you

if you allow it to.

Poverty also can feed you

if you will just receive it.

If after feasting

at the table of Love

your mouth is still watering,

Heaven forbid that you

should run back for more.

The sting of a bee

doesn’t provide the taste of honey

It’s the sweet honey

that makes the bee want to sting.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Waking From a Deep Sleep

Ever since I read the words of the poem below, I’ve been thinking a lot about Shug Avery from the movie “The Color Purple.” Her line, “He scratches out my head when I was ailin’” has been running through my mind. Because I know what she’s feeling. That connectedness of souls; there’s no replacement for that. And I know this because he scratches my head when I’m not ailing, he talks to me, he listens to me, he hears me, he gets me, he reads to me and with me, he is my best friend, my twin soul and he shares his words with me. And reading his words is like sipping on a glass of fine wine, a wine that it took me many years to find. I love the essence of him and there’s no replacement for that.

The poem that follows is another of my he said/she said poems. The one I wrote the other day, “Crying Out My Eyes For You,” which can be found here was in response to his poem, “Waking from a Deep Sleep.”

I fell into a deep sleep,

became lost in your thoughts.

I didn’t think I’d ever wake up.

The albatross was holding me under

and your love became the life jacket

that resuscitated my drowning heart.

I cannot think now without seeking

your face, only to be met with vivid memories

of a tight-lipped smirk and your sarcastic words

“Whatever. Here we go again.”

Words that are written all over your face

and so how could I not hear them?

My situation seems impenetrable,

unaffected by the magnitude of a star-filled sky,

as if though even the stars from above

have no say in determining my fate, but it does

provide me with a twin thought that a love like ours

will provide unshakeable faith in the process

while reaching out from our hidden space

somewhere in the deep shadows of the face of the moon.

Like a spacecraft in the sky,

I see your face hovering above, giving me

an everlasting love to look forward to.

I feel the place where love has touched me,

cradled my still-beating heart and caressed my face.

I love you in my thoughts while I

continue to seek your face. Please don’t go away.

Valued love can only replace a swollen heart,

one that has no place to grow from, an eroding love

box. Love has sentenced me to a cell where only time

has seemed to dwell and where our hearts can survive

by standing the test of time and creating a rhythm

of differing sounds, love played in unison.

Signed the Mysterious Poet Dude

Crying Out My Eyes For You

My tears have always come from emotions

I was too afraid to feel.

I ran from pain that chased me

for one entire lifetime. There were those who

wanted to break apart the world I carry inside me,

to abort the life growing in me. Then you appeared.

No, I didn’t find you. But you were there. One day.

My twin soul. It’s like you never even went away.

And now I know that it’s possible to exist

even when the heart stops beating. An emotional beating,

creating death for a damaged soul. But it was a death

that couldn’t be helped. I fell in love too soon

when I should’ve waited for Love to come

and life me up.

My tears always used to chase my pain

until I found my twin soul again.

Now my tears soak the pages of a love that

didn’t need to be found. It was there all along.

Written on the cosmos of possibility

so we’d never forget to look up toward the stars

where we’d find our names written

against the dark, black, inky sky.

I never craved pain even when I

donned the cloak of inevitability,

was trying desperately not to let go

of what was killing me

piece by piece, destroying me.

I learned how to catch my tears on

the tip of my tongue, pretending

that pain was etched alongside every white line

of the blueprint for my soul evolution.

I cannot pretend anymore when

I finally know it’s safe to throw away the key

and not have to run away anymore.

Finally, I’m safe

in the warm blanket of your love.

Wrapped up in dreams that

don’t strangle & choke me

but that allow me to grow.

For you, with you, and through loving you.

I’ve been crying out my eyes for you

and it’s all because I’m in love with you.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

The Most Important Conversation

Today’s poem came to me as an image. One of a mother standing next to a coffin that has her daughter’s body inside. The mother is weighed down by the grief of losing her daughter, a beautiful young lady. The mother’s soul is crying out in anguish because, in that moment, she realizes she taught her daughter all the wrong things about love. It gets harder and harder for her to stand up straight because she’s weighed down by the knowledge that it’s too late; her Angel is gone and she’s not coming back. So, their souls have this one last conversation, the one they should have had while the daughter was alive.

I offered my once Angel

some words of remorse today.

My silent plea: please forgive me.

After twenty-six years of suffering,

she couldn’t look at me anymore.

She wasn’t able to look into my eyes

and see how I’m suffering

now that I can’t look into her eyes and see

the whole of the world unfolding.

I should have seen the need for an apology

before today. Because when I finally

apologized today, I knew

my apology had come much too late.

Is he here mommy?

Can you tell him, for me,

that I still love him?

That I’m still willing

to fight for our love.

Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.

Sorry I never told you

that the one who truly loves you

won’t ever want to hurt you.

He’ll be drawn to you

and the special light you

emanate.

A light he never wants to dim.

But mommy, he said he loves me.

Sometimes I just make him angry.

Be careful, my Angel, of the ones who

want to dim your inner light

because, for them, you shine too bright.

Every light we see does not illuminate

the path we should take. Sometimes

lust and loneliness pull us onto a path,

one covered with brambles and branches

of a false love and we get tangled all up, trying

to hold on to so many different types of love.

Loves that, in the end, never really were.

Oh mommy, I’m so sorry.

I never wanted to make you cry.

Don’t cry mommy. He said he loves me.

And I believe him.

I should’ve taught you how to protect your love,

to secure your love like you do all valuables.

To keep it locked away where it could be protected

until you found the one who was worth accepting it.

I should’ve told you that just because someone desires you,

doesn’t mean they value you. And you’d never try to spend

counterfeit money so why’d I teach you

to accept counterfeit love?

He said he loves me, mommy.

I’m sorry I never told you

that sometimes it’s better to walk away,

to just let go and walk away.

If you’re walking down the street

and something catches your eye, you stop.

But you don’t have to stay, especially when you see

it never really was what you thought it could be.

Why did I allow you to believe

that finding an old Canadian coin covered in dirt

could produce riches for you? Why didn’t I teach you

that giving away your love should’ve been easy

and would have been easy with the person who chose to

fall in love with your soul?

Oh mommy, why’d I have to die

to finally know he never loved me?

And why did I never warn you baby

about the kind of love that kills,

the love that destroys you because you

aren’t what they need, you’re just what they want?

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Shattered Glass

Been extremely busy lately. I swear I’ve spread myself too thin this semester, but I shall not complain. I’ve been working on my novel, Micah’s Falls, trying to get it completed by December. That combined with all the other things I’m doing has left little time for poetry, but always I come back to my first love because isn’t that the way it always is? Anywho, here’s a little something that flowed from my pen today:

Glass shatters

in the palms of my hands.

Leaving behind scars

of a broken & shattered life.

My birthmark

was a trail of blood.

So somebody should’ve known.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Albatross Around My Neck

Loving you is just too damn heavy.

I’ve been dragging around

the albatross of your love,

trying to hold my head up,

trying to keep my head up,

without letting go. Hoarding your love

like some people hold onto things

they’ve grown accustomed

to having around. Like shoes I can

no longer wear and books I no longer

want to read, I’m keeping your love around

just because it’s familiar to me.

I keep dragging the black garbage bag

filled with your love

through rooms in the house,

a house that should have long ago

been abandoned.

An albatross is not a gift

for showing off to friends,

though some would be jealous to find

that their albatross looks nothing like mine.

So I hide it beneath layers of

insecure phrases, words.

At the end of the day

it’s only words that I have.

I keep looking into

your hooded eyes, searching

for a place to hide.

But the unwieldy weight of

what has become of loving you

keeps me from being able to fit

in the small places you provide

for me.

My head & my heart

have grown heavy

‘cuz your love keeps dragging me

down. Loving you is like killing

myself

one      cut      at      a       time.

It’s like trying to float

while being w

e

i

g

h

ted down.

Loving you, it seems, have very little

to do with love after all.

And that’s why I keep falling

under the heavy weight of the

albatross

tied around my neck,

even though

it’s choking the life out of me.

And here we both stand

congratulating me

for surviving the death defying feat

of loving you while struggling to breathe.

And even when you learned how to breathe

for me, when you could breathe for me,

you chose not to.

And now, because of you

the mere thought of love

conjures images of drowning,

being caught in the undertow

of flesh & desires

trying to find a way to move away

so I can final breathe

& take your diamond-encrusted albatross

from around my weak neck.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Drowning in Blood

When I’m sad, I cry. I always have cried when something was hurting my heart. It was one of those things about me that used to aggravate my mother. She used to tell me, “You need to learn to leave your feelings underneath your bed.” I never learned to leave my feelings underneath my bed.

This isn’t an explanation for today’s poem; it’s just a fact about me. Something I thought about as I was re-reading this poem I wrote at three a.m.:

“Your tears bore me,” you say.

And your words slice me open,

find places not before touched.

And when you’re done cutting me

with your unkind words & careless deeds,

I slice what’s left of me

until I’m swimming in a pool of my own blood.

Drowning.

And no longer able to see:

my own worth.

You’ve conditioned me

to want to feel nothing but pain

& now I’m the one harming me.

But you’ll never know it

because I wear sweaters to shield me

from the cold of this world &

to keep you from really knowing me.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Invisible Me

How can I be so invisible

that you can’t see me

even when you’re staring at me?

How does your gaze slice through

me, like a blade

tearing up my soul

leaving nothing where I used to be?

How can I be close to you

yet

you refuse to see me, choose to

unsee me?

Surely you used to be able to see me.

At least that’s how it used to feel

when you’d touch me &

talk to me.

Then one day

it was like you couldn’t see me

no matter how hard I tried to be seen

&

you started walking all over me

and through me,

making tracks through my soul

where only I could see.

My eyes are mirrors

you’ve covered

with old bed sheets.

Did you think averting your eyes

would render me to invisibility?

Maybe

I’m not invisible and only forgotten.

I’ve tripped and fallen down

the rabbit hole

into the lowest levels of Dante’s inferno

where nobody can ever save me.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind