mastering your absence

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.-Chekhov


Like, I'm gonna crawl back to you, live again where only shadows lie. Yeah, I'm familiar with 
                            that place where I fawn, excuse, deny.
But, oh my, I'm growing now and 
                               appealing as that sounds, there's something about the bright            
light of 
          freedom grounding me.
                                    I just trip in your cast of gloom and my legs-              
they want to
run.
I trembled once at your touch- it was all I knew.  
But 
     then all that waving nearly knocked me over and I learned to fear.
If our bodies are vessels, then I carried you.
                                                               You've broken free. 
Why can't I?
             No, a fresh start cannot possibly mean I enter the crypt of  your new found glory.  
I can't compromise
                my soul to give you safety.
                       Boulders lifted away become stepping stones where 
                                                                                                 with each foot placement, I'm lighter.
                                  I want back a heart of flesh,
division 
           now, 
              of equal rights, a solid body of strength and wholeness.
                             Imagine me a willow, but still.
Covering my own damn heart this time, 
branches hanging, beauteous and protective.  
                                      The weeping-healing.  Letting go                  lamentations, 
convulsing to purge but silent are those tears, 
           shaking body but
                    not mind.
Write an elegy of what
we were
and what 
        we weren't.
But 
black and white means nothing to my movement.
                      I'm 
                        mourning the theft but rejoicing the gift that's left
                                                                                            and seeing myself a widow.
                 I'm a tree unto myself, away from that brush of bullshit.
                 I'm fixing my hair a different way, viewing a new    reflection.
Any assumption
                    that I can't
                              call your bluff 
is a vapor of what you knew before and audacious
                            to say the least.
Our corona became a noose and your latest proposition, a nail in   the proverbial coffin. 
                         Circles do not have points - at least I know my shapes.
Sling mud- it doesn't stain.
   I'm spotless once again.




The SundayWhirl