When your name comes up
When your name comes up, it's like a wild whipping flag cascades in, covering my entire field of view. It is a deep knowing in my head, yet a sharp heavy vertigo from my knees down, filling my legs with mercury. Knowing that something I wanted is forever out of reach, like abandonment, like a misunderstanding that led to a death.
And still the mythology
of the wonder I once knew,
haunts me like a resurrection,
a second coming of someone else's faith.
Abandonment itself is not a feeling. I would not say I feel abandoned, if anything I am the one who is too wary to return to you, too wise to expect anything but the same pain again. It is fear, it is despair, it is an unmet expectation severed with a burn that removes the open slate of my faith. It is an anger at being shut out, frustration that I was expected to let all of this go, bury the rubble within me, hold my own memorials, alone, no friend at my side, no comfort save my own, which I could not create. I was a fool to drown myself to keep your confidences, confidences of those who had left me there to drown. As if that would somehow prove me, instead it has unmanned my heart.
how I wanted all of it,
all of you,
more than you may have known,
more than I want to wonder,
is it possible you did not know how much I wanted,
or is it that I wanted too much?
I know of no way back to that place, but still I cry for it, wonder at the places beyond the beginning. I am almost too afraid to imagine that far, as if I would give anything then to return. And there is where it turns, the confusion where it is easier to be angry at myself for not mustering the return to innocence required to let go, or make my feelings smaller, terrified of being left alone there again. Easier than to jiggle the handle of that door that got quietly closed in my face when I asked you to be accountable, the pain of it closing the way that it did has left me too weak to stomach even a good thing, I could not trust it.
I cannot imagine being able to handle
whatever might be behind that door.
There are unknowns on each side of that barrier,
here these wounds have long storm-raged and ravaged me.
You would not like what I brought to your doorstep,
I am too sure that the unbearable trouble I was then
is surely too much trouble now.
And still the mythology
of the wonder I once knew,
haunts me like a resurrection,
a second coming of someone else's faith.
Abandonment itself is not a feeling. I would not say I feel abandoned, if anything I am the one who is too wary to return to you, too wise to expect anything but the same pain again. It is fear, it is despair, it is an unmet expectation severed with a burn that removes the open slate of my faith. It is an anger at being shut out, frustration that I was expected to let all of this go, bury the rubble within me, hold my own memorials, alone, no friend at my side, no comfort save my own, which I could not create. I was a fool to drown myself to keep your confidences, confidences of those who had left me there to drown. As if that would somehow prove me, instead it has unmanned my heart.
how I wanted all of it,
all of you,
more than you may have known,
more than I want to wonder,
is it possible you did not know how much I wanted,
or is it that I wanted too much?
I know of no way back to that place, but still I cry for it, wonder at the places beyond the beginning. I am almost too afraid to imagine that far, as if I would give anything then to return. And there is where it turns, the confusion where it is easier to be angry at myself for not mustering the return to innocence required to let go, or make my feelings smaller, terrified of being left alone there again. Easier than to jiggle the handle of that door that got quietly closed in my face when I asked you to be accountable, the pain of it closing the way that it did has left me too weak to stomach even a good thing, I could not trust it.
I cannot imagine being able to handle
whatever might be behind that door.
There are unknowns on each side of that barrier,
here these wounds have long storm-raged and ravaged me.
You would not like what I brought to your doorstep,
I am too sure that the unbearable trouble I was then
is surely too much trouble now.