As the days go by I can feel myself going silent, almost mute.
Time rushes past in a flurry of seconds, minutes –
even hours and days – but I remain stationary, immobile.
Withdrawing from reality I crouch as I move further into the shadows,
hiding but not only from myself. I am hiding you from me.
No one should have to spend time with the me I have become.
No one should have to listen to my broken voice,
a voice that has lost its words. A woman who has lost her soul.
I never did have a self. I played at having a self, a sense of me,
a confidence, a center. For moments here and there I could feel
what it would have been like IF I would have had one.
Like shadows on the wall in the flickering light,
not seen, merely blurry outlines guessed by blind or sighted alike.
And I grow further into the silence. The numbness.
Sometimes the pain hits, unbearable with both claws and fangs
and it burrows under my skin, inside my organs, boils my brain.
All the chances never taken, the dreams wasted, the roads
never traveled. All the mes I could have been, should have been.
The moments when time stopped, where life could have gone either way,
but where, instead of choosing, I merely let myself go with the flow
and the further downstream I came, the more I realised I should have
been swimming against it.
So I grow numb with the cold water, and silent with the pain.
No one can scream in pain every hour of every day of every week…
I put on my clown’s suit to go outside. Pretend at sanity, normalcy,
pretend at humanity. But all I can see in the mirror darkly is the
decaying leftovers from the rich man’s table. A shadow of Dorian
Gray, without even the possibility of reversing the mirror’s image.
Life hasn’t been all bad. No, I have smiled and laughed along with
the hyenas at times. I have loved, or willed myself to believe that
I have. I have lusted. I have definitely lusted, and felt the shame with
each and every thrill. Given myself up as prey to the mighty predators
and screamed, again in silence, when they penetrated me. Pretended
that their touch didn’t remind me of the shame of the crimes committed
against me as a child. Pretended, again, at normalcy.
As the days go by I can feel myself going silent, turning mute.
The only immobile artifact in this insanely speeding world
where the rat race must, at any expense, be won so we run.
Further into the shadows I move, away from all that is light,
perserving you from having to deal with me, and me from life.
I have become the monster, the leper of these times.
My voice is lost, and will go un-missed,
as a woman without a soul slowly fades into the nightmare.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult for me to write poetry without rhyming, but it is. Again not having the greatest of days, focusing on all the wrong problems (don’t tell my pshrink, but I’m looking forward to sessions starting up again tomorrow after the Easter break) and digging myself deeper into self-loathing. I really don’t know what to blame this time!? Anyway, since I’m unsure if I’ll get any proper poetry done today, this will be my daily offering to NaPoWriMo 2012 and Day Nine, even though I have once again failed to use the prompt. Happy writing!
I empathize totally with you. I can rhyme and write a poem, but it becomes an aggravating process after a point trying to find words that rhyme. I find it much freer to write in blank verse. Plus a freer mind always amounts to more honest poetry, atleast that’s what I believe in. Furthermore, I can relate to your sense of self-loathing but I found a way around it, I reduce the self-loathing to a banter of sorts between me and myself, a bifurcation of one long soliloquy to a session of repartee between the selves. Maybe it would work fro you as well 🙂
Sometimes the only way to cure what ails is to take a good, deep long look inside. If there were wrongs against you as a child, then, the child is still needing to be given her voice, to scream her fear and to shout out against the injustices against her. The self loathing is natural, you don’t like who you are and so you do exactly what you know will make you like yourself even less, maybe because you know how to deal with her and you don’t know any other way?
It took me many, many years of deep inner soul searching, trying to fathom all the reasons for the many ‘why’ that were done against me as a child but, the answer (I found) was to try to stop the overwhelming anger/rage and to try and look at one piece from all different angles. i.e. One person did this, I wonder what happened to this person in their life to make them want to do this to me? Most abusers have themselves been abused. If you can try to remove yourself from being at the center of everything and try to ‘see’ things from other angles, then, maybe your vision will begin to clear. These crimes against you happened, they can’t ever be taken away nor, even paid for but, I do believe in the end, we are all judged before we give up the ghost and, woe betide them then.
Life is as difficult, or, as easy as we ourselves allow it to be, but, they key to your own well-being (I think) is to look deeply enough and then, try to forgive. My late partner told me so very many times: ‘When someone knows no other way to be, and they behave the way they do because they have never known any other way, you have to try to forgive them Because, they just don’t know any other way to be.’ When you can try to ‘see’ it from a different aspect, it opens you up to allowing yourself, to forgive yourself to.
I wish I could help more but, do try to stop placing yourself at the center of your pain, take a step to the side, and begin to analyse the other people who affected your youth. Pity them, because they just will never know any better way to be. Think of yourself as a survivor, not a victim in anything. You got through it, and, these things are all the things that help us to become who we are meant to be. it takes years of self discovery to learn that what happened was meant to happen because, it was meant to make you grow, to learn from it, and, to never be the same.
Sending you gentle hugs.
I don’t think you have to follow the prompt and if rhyming is your style, then it is your style! Just write what is in your heart!
Thinking about you and Siri lots…..