Rosalind Guy's Blog, page 6

The Morning After

The morning sun penetrates the sheer curtains

and wakes her up. She stretches, becomes aware

of the tight embrace that’s restricting her movements.

A wide grin parts her lips. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

When she tries to turn and twist to look upon his face

she begins to understand she’s only caught up in the covers.

He didn’t come home. The knowledge darkens the sun’s rays

and causes her room to feel like a prison cell, no longer home.

She sits up with the knowledge that he told me he would change

is just a refrain, something she sings to herself to keep from

going insane from continuously dealing with the same mess.

The meaning of insanity is doing the same things and expecting

things to change. And she fears she’s going insane.

It doesn’t take long for her to get dressed because

like a fireman she’s always prepared for the distress of

loving him.

In the streets, she takes turns she’d never take if it wasn’t for

the fact of loving him. She steps through doorways of abandoned

houses, walks down alleyways, walks up to groups of men

whose darkened eyes and dark intentions frighten her, but she’s

trying to find him. Always in the back of her mind, she’s afraid

that she will find him.

She fears the day she will find him unconscious or dead.

She fears the day she will find him with a needle in his arm.

Is that how he chooses to get high? She doesn’t know because

she’s never bothered to ask. She doesn’t want to know how

he chooses to escape, she just wants him to not feel the need to

escape. She fears finding him with his eyes closed, not knowing

if he’s dead or just so high, he’s unreachable.

It’s fear that keeps her walking the streets. It’s fear that keeps her

believing that she has to keep chasing love when it keeps running from her.

It’s fear that keeps her from believing that the morning after should be

spent this way, chasing an elusive love instead of wrapped up peacefully

in her sheets, in her bedroom. That she should be home, the only place

she truly belongs.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Your Smile

What secrets are hiding

behind your smile?

I used to know the language

you use to communicate

But over the years we

became strangers

And now your language

is your own.

I cannot tell if it’s pain or violence

lurking behind your smile

Are you remembering the way

my heartbeat would accelerate when you

were around? The way your words

caused me to imagine my own death or

are you remembering the pleasure you felt

from causing me pain?

I wish I could curl into the curve

of your smile, learn all your secrets

And maybe keep you

from ever hurting me again.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Window of the Soul

If the eyes truly are the windows

of the soul

why is it that I steal a look

in your eyes and

I feel trapped?

Are your eyes really mirrors that reflect

the undeniable truth?

We’re both trapped, prisoners of

our own existence.

The opening you provide for me

allows me to spend days

gazing out, wishing that mirrors were

actually windows.

Why is freedom so elusive?

Sometimes it seems

you’re trying to move closer to me

but your movement is an illusion

that leaves me reeling. When I think

you’re moving closer, I see

you’re farther away

than before.

Life is a beautiful illusion

a trick of the eye that

makes us believe

we can be free

but freedom continues to elude.

Will I be forever trapped

behind the glass wall

gazing out the window

fooling myself into believing

that one day

I’ll be on the other side

looking in.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Love Deep Down in Her Bones

She leans over him

so close she can

still smell her milk

on his breath.

Inhaling deeply, she parts

the shroud of silence

that separates them

Is love an emotion

   or a choice?

She hears her mother’s voice in her mind,

the words cracking her bones

letting her know the aching heartbreak is real.

He’ll grow up one day and leave you

   alone.

Doesn’t seem to matter that her mother

has been dead all the years

since she has been born, died in childbirth.

She struggles to stand

slides to the floor & the blade

glints in her hand,

the truth of what she has come for

slices through the night.

But the loneliness suffocates

She is tired of singing the blues

as if though it were her birthright

When she hears the key slide

in the front door, she knows it must be done

quickly. That love is a choice.

and she must make it.

The knife almost glides across

the curve of his neck. She expects to

have to stifle his screams as the blood seeps

into the pillow lying beneath his head

But one deep exhale is all that comes.

Then the sound of her lover’s voice

“I’m home.”

She smiles to herself knowing

he will be proud of her for what

she has done and that he will

finally allow her to know love.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Snatches of a Friday Afternoon Conversation

He said

But I don’t want to hurt you

She said

Don’t worry my love is bulletproof

No bitter lies steeped in desperate loving

     can destroy

     No burnished, hollow love masquerading

     as true

Carry me in your bosom

he said

so close my heartbeat will mirror yours

And then you will know

She said

I know all I need to know when I

look into your eyes, I see

all the reasons why my love needs to be

bulletproof

He said

I’m nothing like the others

She said

You’re all they were and more

When he smiled, she felt his attack like bullets

to her soul

But because she was bulletproof

she knew she was protected, not loved

but protected

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

The Woman in the Mirror

I recognize the woman, the one

who spends her lunch breaks

napping in the park

Every afternoon she parks beneath

the umbrella of the oak trees &

removes the drape of shame that

weighs her down every day

Away from everyone she finally

sleeps. The elusive embrace of Pasithea.

When she awakes, her gaze sweeps

her surroundings to see if anyone

has noticed her napping.

Afraid that she has somehow revealed

the secrets she’s kept folded in the creases

of her twenty-minute naps in the afternoon.

She digs the crust from the corner of

her eye, not realizing the revelation of

her secrets lie in the hollowness that shades

her eyes like heavy pleated curtains

in the winter time.

Or the way she hugs herself tightly to

disguise the trembling whenever her husband

calls her at the office, 9:15 every morning

without fail is when the trembling begins.

Or the way she cowers and folds in on herself

whenever anyone asks about the dime-sized scar

underneath her eye. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s cute

but I just wonder how you got it.” To keep

from falling to pieces, she goes inside herself

yet another place where she cannot find sleep.

It is the daily naps that to her seem a sacrilege

& that’s how I came to recognize her, the woman

in the mirror who’s too afraid to sleep at night

so she takes naps in the car at the park

the only place she can begin to know

a semblance of peace.

And before she pulls the car away from the curb

she looks up in the mirror and that’s when I see

the desperate look in her eyes, a look that hopes

for the day when she can be free. Until then

she continues to park beneath the trees

lulled to sleep by the song of the birds &

running away from memories that keep

her up at night, keep her from being able to sleep.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Breaking My Own Heart

A poem in the works:

I have broken my own heart so many times

I no longer trust myself to love.

I’ve spent years learning what it takes to unravel my love

and then I am guilty of tolerating people whose full intention

it is, to disentangle my love.

I lurk in shadows of those who claim to love me,

watching and waiting,

knowing full well those are only words. I hear

the empty pauses behind the words and, in my mind,

fill them in.

I never allow myself to suspend disbelief.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Heaven

She found Heaven in his eyes so

she stripped herself naked and

became a planet in his universe.

As if by magic – really it was love –

everything aligned easily

within the shifting of their universe.

Love was easy finally and they knew

they were wrapped in God’s grace.

There were nights, many, when

he fingered her with the sun and the

moon on the tip of his fingers.

Oceans would rush through her belly

when he touched her and though she

sometimes felt overwhelmed by their love

With him, she never prayed to be saved

from drowning, but always, always to be

taken under. Because she’d found a love

that made breathing underwater easy. Finally.

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

A Rape Victim’s Memory

She knows there are some things

a body must forget

like the feel of a stranger’s hand

prying knees apart like a stubborn door

whose hinges scream out for oil

or the rancid smell of breath brushing her neck,

presenting a string of overused curse words

to be placed about her neck like a cheap necklace

or the pressure of a foot placed on her bed

after a window was jimmied open as if though there was

no mother to caution against such childishness

or the feel of calloused hands

laying across her mouth and

the taste of the screams she was forced

to swallow

or the urge to vomit, her throat contracting

as the muted screams scratch against her throat,

something trying to come up

the screams or yesterday’s dinner

or the incessant wondering how he

could fail to translate the hatred she knew

lived behind her gaze – She refused to close

her eyes, wanted him to see her falling apart

or how each thrust felt like a violent ripping apart

of her body, ripping flesh from bone

will she ever be able to forget

any of those things that it’s necessary to forget

or will she continue to carry them along

behind her like a name she never learned

to form her lips to utter

Peace & Love,

Rosalind

Free

She learned silence

in the womb of

her mother’s screams

Becoming invisible

wasn’t hard

when no one wanted you

to exist. She became

proficient at

making herself small

around people she loved

because she learned love

was quiet & unassuming

like her daddy,

existing in the lining of

the life he created

from his cotton candy dreams.

That’s what he called it.

Cotton candy, sweet

at first.

So like him

she settled for

existing in places

where no one could

see her. Just one of

the lies she told

herself.

Then one day

she met a man

cuz that’s what happens

in a love story–

boy meets girl–

& this is a love story

in a way.

This man was intrigued

by her silence, he knew

there were stories in her

just waiting

to break free.

But a prisoner don’t hardly

know how to be free.

And she’d become a prisoner,

locked away in the fear

that if she ever spoke

loud enough to be heard

she’d start screaming too

like her mother.

And she couldn’t remember

a time when she

didn’t want to be

anything but

like her mother.

So she kept silent

No matter how

that man who loved her

tried to free her

she refused to be set free

Cuz a prisoner don’t hardly

know how to be free.

So that man, he

had no choice but

to buy his own freedom, but

he dropped the key

by the door of her cell,

even though

the door stood wide open

& he walked away.

So you see this is

sort of a love story

because there are stories

where love is an emotion

but just not enough

to buy freedom

cause freedom ain’t

always free &

a prisoner don’t hardly

know how to be free

Peace & Love,

Rosalind