The raw emotions of a woman (4 page)

And inside the womanhood are children becoming
compliant alliances, witnesses and detectives, eyes that know the
truths of what powerlessness feel like, what it feels like to love
a man who is always in control with only a sense of superficial
experiences to navigate the deep waters of belief and
emotion.

Inside is an innocent child who dresses up in
clothes waiting to wake up one day and be in a woman’s shoes, to
hurt like she does, to love like she does in a world titled to the
left with all the game pieces falling off the table. And you tell
the eyes that watch you like dew on a flower, you tell them how
lovely it is to be an adult, how beautiful it is to chase around
men like butterflies, how easily their admiration comes like bubble
gum popping and whispers amongst best friends, and how quietly it
undresses you into a better person, the right logical person
without a stray thought towards another life.

And the men come around as you talk like a dark
storm and they act like someone lying about their compliments,
lying about their lust as a way of getting close to God. But there
is a strange truth in their eyes, in the way their mouth curves, in
the thoughts they give away like loose change. And you believe in
the thunder, you believe you live in a house that can be destroyed,
you believe you can get caught in the rain, blushing for someone
who is only a hypothetical thought in the day. And you will be
stuck telling all your friends how you messed up love, wasted your
time on an accident, because they acted nice. In the dead of night
in a half insane frenzy, you were scribbling on refrigerator doors
while standing on half hearted sing song words, because you wanted
so badly to be better. You wanted so badly to be in the story that
has built you from its concrete walls. But all you find in your
moments of innocence is a child, standing in shoes that are too
large for her, asking you again what adulthood is like and you
lie.

You lie to be better than you are, and to never
be alone. Because in this die hard competition among women we only
have the story and we all fight to fit into the story. Even when
those men no longer know who we are.

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The cycle of pain

We often wait like heroes in the winter in the
middle of an abandoned land.

We wait like energy that has only a universal
thought, like beauty that only carries itself by a thin toothpick
on a dark stage, we wait like a smile of someone else that is a few
minutes from changing. And we look the other way while we watch the
darkness invade.

Inside the mystery of love and the broken timer
on a kitchen microwave, is often the strange shopping list for
unknown emotions.

That moment when avoiding life feels more like
living than being in the moment, than standing in your own two
shoes and being present while you feel small, when someone says
something to sound cool, to be thought of casual and sexual,
unknowingly that your devastating memories have become their
entertainment. That your broken heart sitting on the edge of a
kitchen counter has been sliced upon by words that had gotten too
loud in quiet moments, has become food for the ants sweltering
against locked doors. And you sit there quietly in a game designed
for one but everyone plays it anyways, and you hear the laughter of
your life, you hear your most painful moments being relived through
others as a cat and mouse cartoon, as intimacy.

And in the chaos of the laughter and the
giggling and the closed minded weapons of leadership in a ceaseless
uncontrollable wave of emotion, is the feeling of disappearing into
the walls the line our hallways and photographs. It is the hidden
smile of pain as it becomes the next hero, the next broken
unattainable symbol of fitting in for someone else. And the marks
of a hot breath on a cold window become written upon by someone
else’s fingertips.

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Being broken

I am broken we yell to one another, through the
shattered heart of a broken piece of glass, that has split our
tongue, that has destroyed our time into sections and months and
verbal worded arguments. And the broken often have so few words to
describe pain, it is the same words other people use to describe
babble, or superficial entertainment and finical
obligations.

There is never enough time to say everything
you want to say, before life turns its head again, before its face
drowns in the million tears of yesterday and speaks of sorrow. It
utters promises so early in life, it words them carefully as cold
tears on the hot pavement, in a place where please, thank you and I
am sorry have become obligations instead of sincerity.

And we love her, this voice we follow every so
longingly, so easily like a sun that won’t set, like an answer in
the desert, like a lover we can’t fix. And we run towards the
oceans that evade her horizon, the water inside a mind that has
lost its way home, inside of a superficial sacrifice for the
foundation of money instead of love. And inside of who we used to
be is a disease, as if as if we were children running towards
safety, ready for poverty.

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A faceless boy

I am no one says a voice. It was created by
parents who thought a foundation of love was made by sugar and
protection from the strangers who come as thick as walls, that we
can control and demean and easily turn our back on, with words that
are too easily manipulated as metaphors for the experiences we know
we will never have, a second population that are too easily wiped
away by a simplistic cultural compliance, by a faceless boy sitting
in a room of non-humans pretending he understands
wisdom.

And we sit there, these longing strangers
playing games with our tongues and our superficial thoughts as if
we were candy, simple and sweet and so easily digested with licks
and happiness and inner points that are constantly redefined as
boundaries and inner beauty, as a blue sky on a busy day that has
nothing inside of it but children’s palms reaching for the clouds,
and playground rhymes. And we live in these make believe lives
searching for protection in one another, similar truths in a war
until we meet the strangers with a knowledge that haunts at
night.

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Hate

Life
is odd as it moves, the voices that we have heard before, the life
before we fell in love again, over the same cup of coffee the same
eyes, and breath; the same yesterday we always go back and dream of
thinking the past is better perception we carry inside of our
heart. And we wait like travelers moving towards the edge of time,
cocooning into different bodies and different minds, different
agendas as we walk over one another, thinking about one another,
forgetting one another, so easily like the flick of a wrist on a
broken word that hasn’t gone out of style yet.

And we breath waiting to know what is on the
otherside of love, what is on the otherside of the foreplay and the
boredom and the hopes that wait like leaves on a lake,
superficially drowning themselves in dew. We wait like the hunters
and the predators do, on solitude, the beginning of life as time
moves below us now, we just stand in the same place. And inside
this strange solitude with new people, clawing to get out or
clawing to get in, stuck in the hate of power and the hate of
powerless-ness is the cracking of morality, the heckling of another
drunk man being bullied, of another girl thinking she was being
sweet but was called out as dumb, another too sensitive too needy
too lonely person waiting somewhere to be found, waiting to be
liked by the popular kids with their money and beautiful clothes,
wanting to fit in, inside the world of make believe kindness, of
having too much, to to to much juxtaposed against someone who is
too shy to ask for help.

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Pretty houses

A girl sits and waits and watches making dents in
the piles of things that stand in her path, who feels overwhelmed
by those mountains that block love, that throw children under the
bus, that think survival is about who looks prettiest in a picture,
and love is price tag instead of memories, instead of caring,
instead of paying for your daughter’s doctor bills, instead of
showing up for phone calls, or dinners, love is about having the
prettiest best happiest family possible, those who look good in
photographs which hang on the wall next to the laundry room with
granite tabletops in a multi-million dollar house. And against that
stupid crap, is often just a broken heart and an unheard of voice
that was silenced, as all the people become robotic in how they
behave and believe, and eventually they all leave so that it
remains just a pretty house filled with photographs.

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Caught on someone else’s hope

I am caught in a dream
I can’t seem to forget from last night. Caught in the memory of
another face, eyes and love, human touch as I travel along the
seams of human companionship. Laughing about the way my name sounds
on a French Man’s lips who would lie about what he ate for
breakfast if it would make a woman stay longer, inside his
uncomfortable life that fits smugly as a facial expression towards
the easily manipulated.

And we all want to be better, painting our
walls white in hope that someone will graffiti our brain with
better thoughts, ideals like color pencil flowers, like power trips
and authority issues, dressed up as women and men, dressed up as
love instead of babble.

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Married women

The married women all talk about problems as if a
political agenda or a topic change or a painful hurt could all be
washed away by being submissive to a man. “No need to know
reality,” they tell themselves while swooning to human interest
pieces and cats and dogs, putting on makeup in metal tinted
mirrors. “All I need to know is that I have a husband who shelters
me. All I need to know is whose authority to take seriously. So we
can all get along, and not be petty or argue about things that
don’t really matter, because women never really fight about
anything important. Let’s just look at life through the same eye,
where all my heavy thoughts and deepest fears vanish. I can claim I
am good because myself-esteem goes through him first. And I force
everyone to get along because their voices all step on
mine.”

And woman among woman act like this limited
understanding of life is necessary as the unruly emotions have
their way with us behind closed doors, inside the lines in a closed
fist and a broken heart, next to the shattered glass of strangers
seeking approval. “Can’t we all be good enough for that one
husband,” all the women scream, creating a mold from roses, jewelry
and jealousy. And the women on the inside look out at them, knowing
them all by name, she had coffee with each one discussing her
wedding dress, and she says causally as if her heart is not held on
a string balancing on an edge, “only the lucky ones marry.” And
slowly her eyes turn into snakes and her heart into a
child.

“I couldn’t make it in the world,” she whispers
as an apology or a confession to those who look like friends, “I
needed someone else’s heart.” And we all believe her, because why
would she lie?

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Compliance

“
Have sex with me,” cry the angry voices of women,
trying to find a heart inside their legs. “Toy with me, make me
believe in love again,” they scream at heaven for letting them fall
so far from the clouds. “Make me believe in myself again,” they say
worriedly as now their lives have become a broken down storyline
about an incident that no one else can talk about. And inside the
people who believe in people, inside the lives that seem so far
away, is a dance of I told you so on white walls without shadows,
without vulnerability in a game of intension, an underlining sense
of obsession, a let me bend over backwards so a man can hold all my
cards game, that we play to see who can win, who can feel the most
belittled in a fight to be small, to have someone come in and take
away the burden of looking through life in a cracked perception,
which alienates people with words that sound like such harmless
observations at night but become mountains in the day, words of
different points of view, different values, words that create faces
of data on mannequins in store windows wearing orange.

But we all want to buy the same outfit, pretend
that self-abandonment is better than preservation, because it will
protect you from the judgment, it will protect you from the past
and pain. And we curl up inside, thinking a penis and a brain are
the same as solid ground, and we wait like soldiers to hear a
whisper in the wind of foot prints, so that we can say when the
negativity of never being good enough to be sincerely loved creep
into our daily discoveries of ourselves, that seep into
conversations, that come in ever so subtly staring at a kitchen
table, that we have protection. That we are better, because we have
become a part of a much greater entity just by agreeing.

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The men who I have loved

We stare at one another
like children playing with crayons, how will you draw me I ask,
glancing at the colors and the lines, glancing at your fingers as
they move through the selections of us, the timing and the reasons
and of course all the running around we seem to do. And you glance
suspiciously at the color blue.