Terrible, Self-Indulgent “Poetry” Vol. 3

She Tries

She tries to be good

She is never enough

Hushed

Mussed

She tries to fit in

She is always too much

Awkward

Unheard

She tries to stand out

She is never on trend

Frumpy

Dumpy

She tries not to care

She is always too soft

Weakling

Freak thing.

She tries

She can’t

She tries

She won’t

She tries

She isn’t

She tries

She dies

 

On Greatness

First pain

Then fear

Then choice

What choice?

Death

Or devastation?

This is no slum

No favela

No third world shack

Clean house

Bright street

With trees and

Unbroken sidewalks

Liberty

Happiness

Life by Her torchlight

Not now

Lights out

A new dark age

The new poor

Spoonless

Silverless mouths

Is this it?

Did you win?

Are we Great Again?

Other Writings

I’m just finishing up my creative writing class and it’s been incredibly cathartic. I’ve already shared the poem I wrote for class, along with others I’ve written since. I’ve been writing non-stop (what up, Hamilton?) to the point where I’ve got notebooks squirreled away in different places so I always have one handy.

I thought I might like to post some of the pieces I’ve written for different genres in this class as well, because I really have to get over the phobia of letting other people see my writing. They’ll be on their own pages, not blog posts, so if you follow the blog I don’t know exactly how they’ll appear, but watch this space. Noth this specific space. Just the general area. You get the idea.

Seeking My Weird Knight in Shining Tinfoil

(Image found at https://goo.gl/images/ApQER4)

Many years ago, I went to see a psychic, just for fun. I’m a skeptic, but she told me several true things about my life up until that point, and made several predictions. Over the next few months, each of her predictions for the near future came through. The last was aimed at the distant future.

Her name was Maria and she was getting ready to retire. She wasn’t what I envisioned a psychic to be. There was no pretense of having some mystical sight, not one candle burning, or crystals hanging from the ceiling. She was soft-spoken and motherly.

She pointed out the initials of two men I’d cared for and how they hurt me. She picked up on the fact that I hated my job, but predicted I’d soon have a better one, until I was betrayed by someone I trusted, but that I would then find a better job that would pay less, but be long term. Nailed it. I was a VIP Concierge at a Rosen hotel and despised it. I got an interview for an apartment leasing position, and was hired by the district manager. He sold me on how impressive my resume was and how great a fit I was, even going so far as to tell me that raises didn’t happen for a year after hiring, but he’d do his best to get me an increase after three months. He was charming and I believed every word he said. Every time he was in the office, he had kind things to say about me.

After three months and pulling them through a difficult audit, the assistant manager let me know I’d only been hired to work the audit and that I was no longer needed. Not even the manager – I was fired by the assistant manager. When I reached out to the district manager who’d lied to me from the start, he refused to reply.

I was desperate, so I registered with a temp agency and was immediately placed in an office where I remained for 11 years. Two and a half years in, I was hired full time, and the pay increases kept coming, bringing quarterly bonuses with them. She made a few other predictions that quickly proved correct, but the final one meant a wait.

She’d predicted that I would find an extraordinary love, the kind you pretty much only see in movies. She said it would happen when I was older, but “not 40.” I always assumed this meant before 40. When I turned 40 last year, I was disappointed, but then I realized she only said “not 40.”

I turned 41 yesterday. By the beginning of this coming January, I’ll start attempting online dating. I’m awkward, weird, sick, and not very social. I have unresolved daddy issues and low self-esteem. I’m a catch. My lovable weirdo is out there somewhere.

(Image found at https://goo.gl/images/i7ywRE)

Terrible, Self-Indulgent “Poetry” Vol. 2

Image found at https://goo.gl/images/YEjubx

She (8/29/17)

Hair like fire

Eyes like coal

And a tongue like flowing lava

 

Heart like ice

Gaze like stone

And a soul like a glacier’s cold

 

Skin like paper

Bones like twigs

And a body like uncooked dough

 

Veins of blue

Lips of red

A face with the traits of her mother

 

Tears held back

Smile forced on

Scars left by the hate of her father

 

She is broken

She is bruised

But she goes on, surviving and seething

 

If We Fall in Love (8/30/17)

My favorite flowers are daffodils

But only the yellow ones

The white ones are boring

You should know this if we fall in love

 

I don’t want a diamond ring

I want a moonstone poison ring

‘Til death do us part; our joke

You should know this if we fall in love

 

I’m kind of broken and scarred

And a total mess of a person

Literally and figuratively

You should know this if we fall in love

 

I get angry over nothing

And sadder than I can explain

But there’s goodness in me

You should know this if we fall in love

 

I am silly and serious

Both scary and scared

Never good or pretty enough

You should know this if we fall in love

 

I don’t know how to be loved

But I know I can love

I promise to try to deserve it

You should know this

If we fall in love

Terrible, Self-Indulgent “Poetry” Vol.1

(Image found at https://goo.gl/images/xaEQAq)

I will occasionally post badly written, navel gazing, free verse “poetry.” If you can deal with annoying alliteration and obnoxious metaphors, welcome to Terrible, Self-Indulgent “Poetry” Vol.1…can I call it a volume if there are only two entries? Fuck it. It’s my blog.

Moonchild (8/24/17)

No one should look so alive in the 2 PM heat

But she shines, even standing on the crowded balcony

Everything around us is beige and bland

But not her

Blue hair and a bit of silver sparkling on her nose

I can’t look away from her eyes

Onyx?

No.

Obsidian?

No.

Graphite.

Yes, that’s it.

Graphite. Dark and metallic.

We’ve never met, but I know her

Manic

Pixie

Dream

Girl

I hate her

I want to be her

She won’t speak

She can’t speak

She just stares with those eyes

Looking farther and further

She is a child of the moon

Blotting out the sun so only her light can be seen

No one else sees her

Crowding together and staring at the sky

Too much in awe of the eclipse

Unaware that SHE is the eclipse

When the sun returns, she is gone

 

Home (8/28/17)

Home is where the heart is

My home is a cage

Made of bones

The thing inside is dead

Or dying

A fragile creature

Stomped, crushed, shattered

Put back together

Too many times

Held together by hope

And hope is dying, too

If I give it away

If I trust again

And he breaks it

It won’t survive

Dead thing in a cage

Of bones

Don’t Mind Me, I’m Just Looking For Attention

After months of aggravation, I finally finished the last of four math classes in a row. On Tuesday, I started a class I’ve been excited about for months — creative writing. My excitement didn’t last. It started innocently enough, but rapidly went downhill. There was an assignment to watch or read JK Rowling’s 2008 Harvard commencement speech, and comment on what we thought of it. I posted that I admired Rowling for her attitude about failure because I’d fallen on hard times myself. I mentioned that this coincided with writers’ block, and my instructor asked if I kept a journal, because that can help with writers’ block. Harmless. right? I responded, saying that I’d recently started a new blog to help work through physical and mental health issues. Her response completely floored me when she basically said that no one likes reading cathartic blogs about upsetting issues and that the people who write them just want attention.

What?

I probably should have kept it to myself, but I was so upset that I pointed out that the attitude that people talking about depression or other mental health problems are attention-seekers is exactly why so many of us fear speaking up and the result is a frighteningly high body count due to suicide. I don’t think she liked being called out, though I didn’t adress her directly and was very polite. Every exchange we’ve had since then, she’s made it clear she doesn’t think much of me.

As for bloggers being nothing more than attention whores if they write about things that aren’t super happy and the fact that no one likes reading what they write, I present Allie Brosh and Jenny Lawson as evidence to the contrary. Both women are bloggers with an enormous following, successful published authors, and write about mental and physical health problems.

Regardless of my awareness that what she said was absolutely incorrect, it still stings. No one living with any kind of major illness needs to be told that they’re just looking for attention and that no one cares to listen to them. This isn’t the first time someone has done this, there have been people in all areas of my life who have used various versions of this to tell me, “You don’t matter. You’re not good enough. Everything you do is wrong.” Please don’t ever do this to anyone you know. I can assure you, those thoughts are already in their head. A second opinion will not help.

You don’t have to save me from drowning, but don’t tell me to stop trying to get attention when I’m gasping for air.

When I Was Just a Little Girl…

It’s not as if I don’t know I’m ridiculous. I am no one’s dream girl, manic pixie, or otherwise. I dated my first boyfriend because I was sixteen and had never had a boyfriend. Most of the time I couldn’t stand him. He was not bright or attractive and, at the time, I believed I was enormously fat and repulsive, so I was glad for the attention. He treated me like my father did, and back then, I thought that was normal. I don’t think I can list all the reasons I thought I was fat, but I know now, looking back that I wasn’t. Fucking hell, I had a 27 inch waist. And I wasn’t repulsive. I wasn’t great at doing my makeup, but that’s something I still have problems with. I did have relatively clear skin and long, glossy hair. My legs looked fantastic in my show choir uniform of shorts and fishnets. Anyway, he cheated on me with one of my friends, and the self-esteem monster convinced me I deserved it. Being incredibly awkward kept me from trying again.

My weight started to yo-yo when I was 13 and discovered the power of binging and purging. Life spirals out of control, find something you can control. (Just make it something good. Exerting control over your life by hurting yourself is never the answer.) Years of the cyclic self-destruction took their toll. I met someone, and even though I knew he’d never love me, it drove me to “improve” myself. I stopped binging. I stopped eating regular meals. I took diet pills. I was almost as thin as I’d been in high school. Guys were looking at me like I was attractive. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucked up I’d have realized what I was doing. I got scared of the attention. I ate. And ate. And ate. People don’t look at you at all when you’re morbidly obese. It’s almost as if they’re ashamed on your behalf. Adults, anyway. Kids are assholes and will say whatever comes to mind. My favorites were the child who said I was too “wide” for the moving sidewalks at Universal and the other who stopped his yappy little purse dog from running after me by yelling, “No chasing whales!”

When I was 28 I decided I needed to get healthy. I was doing really well. I worked out five days a week and I ate healthy food. Then the battle with autoimmune disease stopped me in my tracks. It was like the Universe saw me finally starting to get things right and said, “Fuck you,” and suddenly I could barely walk.

Depression and suddenly being sedentary led to a gain of 50 pounds in six months. Even though I eventually reached the point where I could walk without too much pain, I’d given up. I just kept getting bigger. I’d learned there were words for what I was living with. Bipolar Disorder. Social Anxiety. I built a wall of fat around myself. It was safe.

I was close to 350 when I was laid off from my job. I had a mental break a few months later where a therapist suggested I should be hospitalized. I said I couldn’t afford it and I didn’t go back to that therapist. I started to fill my time with long walks and lost some weight, but when I was working again, making half my former salary and having no insurance, I lived on bologna sandwiches on white bread and ramen noodles while taking the only immunosuppressive drug I could afford – Prednisone.

Remarkably, it wasn’t my weight that led to Diabetes, but the steroids. Before I was diagnosed, I began dropping weight quickly and I thought it was just because I was too broke to overeat. By this time I was in my late thirties. My skin was not as springy as it once was and I was covered in stretch marks from years of rapid weight gain and loss and more gain. I moved from Florida to Tennessee and, though my RA was bad enough that I needed a walker, I started walking for exercise again.

At my lowest, I was 206. I’ve bounced around between there and 220 for over a year. I’ve tried to examine what mental blocks are holding me back. For one, I’m almost 41 now and my skin sags even more. I am repulsed by my own body. Continuing to lose weight will not improve that. For another, reaching a weight below 200 signifies that my safety wall is nearly gone. I’m already past morbidly obese. I’m just plain obese now. If I get down to 173, I’ll just be overweight. I don’t know how to be a “normal” sized person. I can remember a time when I felt sort of good about myself, but I can’t remember what it felt like.

I tried to start a project at the new year, taking selfies every day and posting them online. But my double chin and gross skin (thanks again, autoimmune disease) get in the way, so I work the angles to hide the chin and slap on filters to lessen the redness of my face. I’m a fraud. I gave up the selfies because they were just making me feel worse.

Now I’m at a crossroads. I’m long past the age when people generally find love. I know, at least right now, I’m incapable of loving myself. Part of me wants to accept it and pick up the mantle of spinster cat lady. Part of me can’t let go of hope that somewhere, there’s someone who can love me, and maybe more importantly, make me feel worthy of love.