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