Amputation

[sevendeadlyfun]

It's different. This time,

I don't wait for the healing

to happen gradually, don't wait

for your things, the things

you left,

to find their places.

I sweep them away,

sweep you away

because it cannot be that you are here

and not-here. I already feel the dull heavy confusion,

the part of me that is you

amputated.

life after is awkward

limbs that lie

uncooperative in bed and the apartment

an alien landscape, feeling foreign

I don't speak the language

of loss.


While I am not cool enough to turn my fanfic hobby into something professional, I am a published poet. Yeah, it sounds just as cool when you say it to people in real life. They're all "Huh. Really?" because poetry is not something Americans, as a whole, are comfortable with. In fact, most Americans read all the poetry they will ever read during high school and manage to successfully avoid it thereon. So saying you're a poet, in an American context of high-powered jobs and high-rate mortgages, is akin to admitting you moonlight as a gloryhole attendant. People are confused that you'd admit something like that so openly, but no one wants to be unliberal or bigoted about your personal choices. If you want to be a broke loser, who are they to judge?

Actually...I'd make more in the gloryhole.

But, 48 hours into my husband's third deployment, I'm just trying to spring clean my head. And if anyone wants to con/crit (or better yet, write me some Spike/Xander gloryhole porn), I promise I won't lose my mind. I can separate the criticism of my words from the criticism of my feelings.

Comments

[angelswilliam.livejournal.com]

Your poem is a very hard-hitting extended metaphor. I don't quite understand the part "the apartment an alien landscape," but don't be discouraged by that, as my mind does not handle abstract ideas nearly as well as the average person. It actually has a specific disability with that area of processing.

As far as Americans and poetry....
I have a great passion for Robert Frost's work, who was an American poet, as it so happens. My favorite poem is "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The last 3 lines are the ones I like to quote. Unfortunately for me, though, the pride I once took in taking the different path (being much less conservative and uptight than other Republicans and Christians and having my own very unique beliefs about the higher power system without allowing the Bible or the church's teachings to command my conclusions) has now been dampened by the fact that I can no longer be demonstrative about it while living with my parents in their oppressive and, at times, dangerously bigoted village.