Toxic Women I Have Loved

You are traumatized, woman.

Your whole self is one big string of survival mechanisms

And so you have become toxic

You reached out so many times and each time you were pushed away

And when you tried to run away and you were pulled back in

So now you are chaotic

And where ever you go this chaos follows

You manifest it

In each wound that is cut so deeply

And the world re opens them again and again

The world is what has stopped them from healing

Ripped apart endlessly

You sew them shut hastily before you could clean them out

And mold grows thick and black inside

You don’t make sense (On the surface)

But there is a reason for each lie, each manipulation, each outburst

You break yourself. You run away and stand your ground, but always at the wrong times.

So you stay so stuck

Your misery is the only thing you have left

When it’s all youve ever known

There’s a comfort in it- familiarity

And you are terrified to change

Of being not broken. Of being not yourself anymore

Because the only thing you’ve attached to is your own self hatred

So you make those who love you crazy

And you are so hurt- you are so alone.

There is a reason for everything you do.

There is a cause. There are people who caused this.

But you are toxic. You are dangerous.

And I can no longer love you like I did.

Love Devours

He knows me in a new way

Unfamiliar to me

How his eyes rest on my bones

And he wants me in a new way

I haven’t felt before

His fingertips sinking into my sternum

And he sees me in a new way

A new story unfolding

Ringing his heart out into my throat

In a way that makes me question

Who are you? Where have you been? How did you find me? Where did you come from? How long have I been waiting for you? How many times did I die before I found you?

His love was poised and waiting for me

And now I am devoured by him at last

The Revelation

A revelation: that I can feel this way again.

That the dullness and the fog could give way to something so shining with life.

I thought this part of me had died with my old life

I re emerged from the edge of death with a coldness in my bones

But what I needed was your words, and all the sounds that your mouth makes

The way your eyes track each movement of my limbs, the way you see each twitch and tremble until you catch the rhythm.

You cup my pulse in your hands and blow your sweet breath on it until the pace quickens

And I bloom out from within the container of your chest.

Somewhere I already knew how to blossom.

What I needed was a steady hand to hold my soil.

The Distance

You love me from a distance

Like there are whole fields and twisting roads between us

Like we set out to meet, but walked right by going opposite ways.

We missed each other by minutes.

I waited alone in the dark.

You sat patiently under the trees.

I orbit wide. I carried asteroids on my shoulders.

And when I finally made it back to earth

You turn away from me like you don’t know who I am, or where I’ve been.

We reach for each other, grasping in syncopated rhythm;

And once in a lifetime the tips of our fingers brush and lock together.

There is something we cannot forget:

The potential that we lost-

That slipped away as we turned apart-

Interrupted by our own journeys.

There is a way it could have been different:

In another world, on another timeline,

When maybe we did not sever or snap with the fierceness of bone.

The First Love After You

The first love I felt after him-

It was when our eyes coming together told me how deeply I had been broken open and emptied out.

I know because in the moments we move together I can feel my skin tug apart and my chest leak an amber colored syrup like thick sap

And with each muscled contraction of my heart there is a pump of pain- a surge of heat, like i am leaping off a cliff a thousand times.

Yes, I am doing it again.

I flake the dirt off my knees.

Six years of falling. And I have finally reached the ground.

I ache for a wild love. A love where we learn how to share bile. To trade back and forth between our mouths the acid that washes into our throats from the deepest places. Burning our tongues with the sharpness of our stories.

But it will not be you.

Six years I fell. And I’ll fall again.

Here I will be once more, brushing the dirt from my knees. Left back at the beginning. Broken open. Emptied out. Ready again. Until my time folds in on itself.

Lost in You

You are the father I always wanted

You are the lover I always needed.

Next to you I was as calm as a rock.

With you I was as wild as a storm.

So I came back again. After everything. I could not stay away.

I know now: You are no soulmate. And this is no fairytale.

It was a frenzy. A flock of sparrows that swarms and then comes to rest suddenly.

I cannot explain us in moments. It was in the movement we made together:

The flashes of dark. Sudden ruptures of light. Bursts of secret sadism. The pain of pushing and pulling endlessly.

And finally out of my throat black spores erupted all over you.

This was my deepest fantasy, manifested as raw as sunlight. I could never have enough.

So we dug down together, until it collapsed all around us.

And now I am sick of you. I am sick from you.

I will never be so deeply lost in you.

After

After the break up

After the reconnection

Where does this leave our story?

I can finally face it. How I’m letting you go.

Or at least the idea I had of you.

It was an illusion. A dream I constructed.

Like a child desperately seeking a shape in the clouds.

So here we are:

At the beginning of something new. Or at least different.

Finally sitting with what is real.

But I feel strange here. I keep looking over my shoulder: looking back at our past. At how we got to here.

Remember when we heard that warning? Know when it is time to release. Know when the tether has gotten too tight.

It meant nothing to me then. I couldn’t see then what it would feel like now.

Life is painful that way. The sweetness. The sadness. That tender, bitter sensation that lets you know you have stumbled on truth.

I have been swallowed by the pain of it.

This is the next part of our story. This is the next lesson.

There was no lie.

I could not have gotten what I needed then, if I knew where we would be now.

So this is what was always meant for us.

There is no other way it could have been.

Because I gave you everything then, I know how to survive this now.

The tragedy of it is as thick as a ripe fruit in my mouth.

And with the tragedy I am returned to myself.

This is how it always needed to be.

This is how it always was meant to end.