de profundis clamo

Someone is paying attention
Someone knows
And understands

My shadow scares me
I keep trying to die
But someone wants me alive
To torment
To love
I really don't know

How much pain
can a heart feel
and still pump blood?
                                   I heard that somewhere
                                                                        from someone.
Maybe my mother.

That poem...about car sitting...
That I wrote
On our anniversary last year
only a few days before the annulment was made final
                                                              when I decided to let go
And move on
                      and less than six months later
                                                                      he left....for good...or bad...
And I think about the car sitting now.
How I thought he would be the perfect father
for my children.
He would not yell at them
And he was really really REALLY smart
I pushed them together
every chance I could
He was better than me
                                   and I knew it
Learn from him
                                   not me

The December after the September
I gave my life away
I was standing in the living room
Of the house in Miami
On the Air Force base
                                   loving the sound
                                                              of jet engines
firing up and taking off
In the midst of all that noise
                                            there it was
The first kick from my daughter

I had life inside me
                              now it was real.

And today I grieve for the one who helped me create it.
He left
And all my thoughts of creating a
Happy Home Happy Family
were gone...with his suitcase.

Love Songs: Severe Thunderstorm Warning

(I began this poem about a year ago...I think. 
I have no clue what it meant then. 
But with all this pain
I must be moving on
To something new...)

"This is a love song
Made up of moments
we've never shared together."

                                                          I sang that song for two weeks
                                                          In a play
                                                         Kissing a boy
                                                         I can't remember his name
                                                         or his face

Love song

Lent begins on Wednesday
This is one of those big years
I have three days to decide
how to live it.

Last night's storm woke me
And I prayed...
the 22 carat gold rosary in my hand
And I wondered about the dream

Another friend, stage 4 cancer
Right now, I am wanting to distance myself
from all this
suffering

Still it is more than a year
and I have not left the suffering
of others
and I have discovered
my own.

Now is the season for poetry
The season for for dying to self
Yet self is all around me

I tell them
I am in pain
I hurt enough
to entertain death again,
cook it a meal,
serve my best wine,
and say,
"Let's be friends forever."

I tell it to my best friend
in the whole world
The one
whose brother
Hanged himself
on Mother's Day
when he got tired
of
remembering.

A good friend, I am.
                                      She stays even then.
I pick good ones.
                                      But I can't seem to heal.

Did I decide to live this way?
Or did it just happen?

Around again

The sun and the earth meet
In this same place every year
The moment begins here
Where there is more dark than light
The day I got married

I sat on the hood of the '64 Plymouth Fury
And talked with God

This is what I deserved
Playing with fire, not caring
who used by body
or why
Giving up on love so long ago
Now feeling anything was rare
And only a problem
to be endured

Why, God? Why this? Why now?
And I knew the answer
But I didn't want to hear it

or feel it

This was the best solution
To a young woman sliding quickly
into hell
A woman who ran out of options
because she would not stop staring at the wall

There was a door
There was a window
But she placed her nose close to the wall

The way the nuns made her do
when she asked too many questions

Why God? Why this? Why now?

Yet I marveled at the life growing inside me...
I would have preferred to walk the path alone
But like really living a life,
I was too scared
And I knew NORMAL people
got married

So I sat on the car
And considered my cage:
Could be worse, you know

I looked up at the sky, filled with the stars
of the atumnal equinox
and thought
I'll never be an astronaut,
a scientist, a lawyer,
or a movie star

I'll be a wife and a mother
It's what I deserve
A cage...no one will ever know I existed
Oh God...what have I done?
I have killed myself before I was even alive.

Such were the thoughts
of a selfish child
who never felt or knew love
whose life was determined without her consent
was it?

These thoughts would take years to forgive
and even more to understand

Cindy September 23 2012

Scary But True

"You will be a healer,"
God said, as He fashioned my body
From a lump of clay.

On this day, I formed you
Created you in your mother's womb

No, it was not in the union of man and wife
But in an act of passion
In an act of desire
And perhaps desperation
Between one who wanted a future
And one who simply wanted right now.
Humble beginnings

Hear that Ave Maria on the radio?
That's for you to remember
She had to endure a lot
To have her son
In a society that would rather kill off a life
or two
than let someone off the hook

She risked all to give life to a child
That somewhere in her heart
She knew he might just save the world. 

Such is a mother's love.

You began in humility
You were asked to suffer
And in that suffering
You had a choice:

Be bitter. Be angry. Get even. Take all you can. Now is all you have.
Or
Be patient. Be compassionate. Be humble. Serve so that others might live.

Use your life, your pain, to heal

You have the choice to heal
Or to destroy
To love
Or to hate
To build plowhares into swords
Or swords into plowshares

To risk death: physical, emotional, spiritual...
To give life

Choose life.
Be a healer.

Ugly things

She said I wrote ugly things
But I didn't

I wrote what was going on
I wrote how I felt about it
And then I hid it
Little scraps of paper
Placed behind milk bottles
Inside statues
Behind pictures...

Often behind the monstrous picture of me
The one she had made
And had"doctored"
So I looked like what she wanted me to be
Instead of who I really was

Behind there I put my dark poetry
Not the kind words for Hallmark cards
Not the "You are such a wonderful mother"
Not the "I love you so much"

But the ones where I was being chased
The ones about how I was hiding
And some about how I gave in

Much, much later...
when I was a teacher
I found "ugly poetry"
on one of my students' desks

I read it...and understood it...
behind the obscenities and sexual suggestions
I heard the cry
And did something about it

A couple of years later
I saw the young girl in a movie theater
I just stood there
She saw me...and ran to me...and hugged my neck

She said, "I'm living with my grandmother now."
And she looked down at the carpet.
Then she looked up.
She hugged me again.
She said "Thank you."

Sometimes...we get lucky
Sometimes we don't

Cindy

I do not care for my bed

I do not care for my bed
You may buy me another if you wish
But this is my bed for now

I allow you to make love to me
I'll play Clare to your Francis
Or Teresa to your John
But quite frankly
This is my bed for now

I wait for you to want real things
And not plays or pretends
To see me as I really am
And love ME
Not the woman you want me to be
But the woman I am
I'll wait...
But not forever

What Love Does

What Love Does

40 years ago, I made a decision
To protect myself from a danger
In a manner quite unorthodox
With consequences I never could have imagined

40 years ago
I thought I could stop the violence
By building a wall
To stop feeling
To live
But to live on my terms
To keep all the power
To save the world
And little children
From the darkness
That I knew was there.

But the plans of a fifteen year old girl
Can hardly stand in the face
Of the plans of the world
Or of God

Sometimes
if we are lucky
We lose
And love wins
Anyway

Cindy
August 7, 2012