Tabitha Vohn's Blog - Posts Tagged "pain"

You are the girl
I would have looked up to
in high school
Vintage tees and broomstick
skirts smell of the man who sold
them, the one that was with you
last night
old enough to be your father
and maybe recommended
by him
like good weed
a fix that keeps on giving
Your friend dragged you from
the swimming pool last night
where you--like Echo--unwound
gauze layers like peeling away
their pain when their eyes lick
your skin their charred fingers
raised poisons kept you afloat
a face-down Ophelia with hair
in seaweed tendrils
She would feel the heavy
carelessness of your
confidence that someone would
love you enough
to pull you out of it
It's that dancing that keeps your
ears clear of the symphonies
of phonies you're not trying to
hear
keep swinging
poll center
heart center
spread
dip
roll
find your center
warm chests you press to
it's not so different to close
your eyes under the lights
and feel the love
while they stick another dollar
bill in your g-string
anymore than it was to
free fall into that endless
ocean blue the chlorinated
hue of forgetting
that once
there was a little girl
with dreams of fairy princes
whose white horses
took a detour in middle school
when they realized it was girls
who'd get on their knees
for a hell of a lot less than
diamonds
and you
already knew
the feel of those carpeted
brush-burns
the education they sought
came from you
a fearlessness that was
a comfort to the rest of us
trying so hard to playact at
what we thought we had to be
our feelings fragile as loose
feathers the pluck and bleed
and all our hollowed-out insides
that growing up too fast demanded
you were a phoenix
and we prayed to be like you
even as we called you
slut
whore
home-wrecker
behind your back
our green tongues powdered with
secret love
we never saw the empty rooms
you went home to
or the used needles in the kitchen sink
or your panties mixed in with stranger's
clothing
or the diary you kept that said whether
or not today you want to live
all we saw were the rainbows the scarves
the beaded curtain framing your face
the wild abandon of your laugh
we ignored the urgency
with which you threw yourself
into that swimming pool.

The past few months
have been some of the most
painful of my life
Horror made flesh
thinking I'd lost you
my heart and head in
constant combat
warring over footsteps
traced back overgrown paths
that led us here
I dissected every fallen branch
fleeting white bird
trying with my fingers to feel
the indents of footprints
where I'd misstepped
was it too many texts?
not enough space between
my exhales to give you room
to breathe? did my desperate
attempts to keep you
smother your lungs with shadow?
was my imprint in your heart
merely an inlet
a temporary crevice
to let the light in?
Truth is
none of it matters
I dream a life so impossible
wanting to fold you in it
wanting to reinvent home
a place to call yours and
this connection of ours to
stretch in symphonic chord
eternal
always calling you back to me
I never stopped
to consider
that I made my steps rocks
at your feet
my tears tidal fetters too
vast of an obligation to
wade through
These past months
I've cried enough and
died enough for
both of us
lost in the labyrinth of
this nightmare I feared would
put on human skins
of
losing you, losing you
losing you, losing you...
but love, you are not mine
to lose
and you never were
and love
damn...I miss
calling you that
telling you good morning and
wishing you goodnight
Sometimes the need to
tell you I love you
swells in my throat like
panic constricts my lungs
and so I say it to a piece
of jade to forsaken air my
prayers become pleas
God, let him know how much
he's loved today
my sweet wonderful gift
I tell you that too often
but that
is truth
mirror brother
whose bond I feel
deep as blood
that space you carved
is always yours
and I hope you have room
to breathe now
I hope from now on
to love you truer
to my word
no strings attached
setting aside my covetous
self
allow the chaos
to have its course
I've never doubted
for a single
minute of it
that you're worth it.

I've learned
Love and Pain
are cyclical
they are kissing cousins
ashamed of the way they
can't keep their hands off
each other
seemingly cannot exist
one without the other
Love
you built like a storm
gathered just noticeable
on the horizon
Moved
too quickly for me to
take any cover
--You--
were the
swell that cracked the levies
the grandmother who let the
wolf in
I feared to feed him
knowing that when he's
fat and comfortable
he'll awaken to heavy
stones sewed into his belly
Shocking
Irrevocable
where once he had only felt
Full
where Pain crowds space
like a dance partner stepping
out of tune
tattered slippers
bloodied toes
I have
felt that Weight
--too full of your Absence
to move--
scraping my soft insides
against sharp edges
Sutured in
where your once
coveted
I love you's
had been
Now I learn to exist between
Chaos and Calm
those Stitches cradling
Quarries of regret come
tumbling out
when I
loosen the ties
I try
to Bind you with
feel less heavy
if I
Splinter the box
I've Fought
to keep you in
I replace
Fetal positions
with Faith despite the
marshes of
demon whispers
I've fallen
in
Learning
Pain is the
Love child
of Expectation
things Hoped for
or
things Lost
Cannot Be Replaced
only Found again
and before I
clung to
any of that
my Love for you
was the Same
as it was
will be
has always been.

I've been trying to
force myself to be
okay

as if I can
rearrange my
spiritual insides
through sheer will

as if filling my
days with endless
tasks tasked to
prove I deserve to
exist can somehow
make me worthy of
what can only be
construed as gifts

meanwhile

my brave smiles
feel like frauds
I cry from exhaustion
on the drive home
feel unworthy of
thank you's
ask constant forgiveness
when I pray
Most of all I feel
Guilty

How can I be
sheltered
in such a calm
sea of blessings
yet
acknowledge this
broken limb I
keep trying to
kick with

It's like maybe
if I stopped trying
to force myself to
be happy
I could stop
hating the truth
that I'm not yet
healed

If I
stop tugging on stitches
mending
my heart could
beat free of this
antiseptic sting

Maybe if I
can just accept that
I loved someone
enough to upend my
spiritual insides
and I don't want to
reinvent again

Because hope dies
last
and I'm still standing
with scalpel in hand ready
to donate heart, arms, voice,
this pen, sleepless nights,
tear-stained streets, yoga mat
cries and heavenward pleas

Maybe if I can
forgive myself for
mistakes
I fear I must have made

Then I'll make space
for redemption to
enter in

It's true
God heals us when we're
broken
It's equally true
I have to let Him

We are the sum of
absent parts too fractured
for our fathers to pass
on to us

pride & hugs
admissions of love
they harbor like empty
perfume bottles long
bereft of scent I remember
what it meant to live like
a squatter in my own home

welcoming my brother into
the bedroom I'd amp up the
speakers when screams
punctured the walls in stereo

when burning precious gas
dollars down back roads with
no center line or sunsets in
an abandoned cemetery felt
like the only freedoms I was
loathed enough to know
before my absence was missed
in an otherwise confined
existence my presence a
tolerated mandatory sentence

I daily wondered how someone
so disgusted with me
could care whether or not I was
around

Your generation is not the first
to seek an amputee home
though transience has become
a pathogen passed through the
water each year the mortality rate
grows younger & I wonder
what remission might be missing
if the wounds were only allowed
to fester a bit longer

My feet trod through
land mines of a battle
I was drafted in I
contemplated pastor's basements
and then-boyfriend's parents'
spare bedrooms
rather than wait for the misstep
I thought would solidify the sum
of all those fractured parts I knew
the breaking would be inevitable

But I waited.
I stayed.

You know, when the blast came
I was too numb to feel it.
All those flesh wounds hieroglyphed
each what, where, when
But I remember him being
more stunned by my apathy than
I was when the gingerbread house
caved in

By then I felt neither love
nor hate for the man who had
damaged me so much
the blessed coma of indifference
was a victory

And if that was the end of my story
I'd say to you
--run--
run & never look back

Instead I urge you Love
--stay--
go back
Live to fight another day.

In the short term was
cease fire coldness
his first "I love you"
felt as foreign & intimate
as a rape
it's been fifteen years
since that date and I've
risen from those ashes to
say:

There's Healing in
understanding our fathers
and that Mending is
--Necessary--
cause ghosts breed monsters
and we have to see them
for what they are
to keep ourselves from
slipping into that impalpable
grey likeness of hereditary
brokenness

Though their stories are dissimilar
at the core of our fathers is the same
guarded barricaded hunger
wanting to be loved but not knowing
how to give what they haven't received
those instincts long buried with the dead
& with the rejectors & with the ones who
kicked them out of houses, made them
feel their lack of worth was a brand
under their skin they could never wash
out, these men emanate hurt
like steam rising from
asphalt

Nothing can resonate from a heart
iron-walled in, only if it be that
Pavlovian rejection, they do not realize
the imbalance of criticisms they pay us
with no praise or the silence we take as indifference
Pinter moments are all they have to offer us
but we weren't taught to read their eyes like Braille
and they never recognized that the work of their hands
fashions a mirror symmetry of brokenness

Love, I've looked at your dad and seen the
kindness he wishes he could give you
buried beneath that rough veneer I fear
his asking you to stay was the closest to
an admission of love as he could give you

There's a heart breaking for you under all
the inner shit he can't claw through to
be what you so desperately need him to be

Know how I know?
A week before my wedding, my dad
threatened to kick me out for the millionth
time, all because he found a dirty cup in my room
and on the day of my wedding, my brother came home
and found him sobbing. To this day, on the rare occasion
that I get an " I love you" it's delivered with the reticence
of a dog waiting to be kicked. it's been hard for me to
parent love to someone who's been animal wounded
and tried to pass that heirloom on to me

but my hatred, and numbness, and hurt
are healing over. I wish Dad's would but
he's still trodding land mines, shouldering the
burden of hereditary curses on tired shoulders

So is your dad
because deep down our fathers don't believe
they deserve our love
so they covet theirs greedily

But Love,
I tell you all this
because your tender spirit is
at that same precipice
and I'm filling up the emptiness
with true stories & fretting &
tears & prayers because

At this crossroad
We have one of two ends

Make peace with the enemy
Or become them.