Humiliation

when it’s so damn raw ( “Shadows” reworked)

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

The next poems will be raw

Nothing held back

There’s love yes oh yes there’s love

But darkness and hatred too

at how you unmanned me unwoman-ed me

turned your back when I reached for you

yanked my heart out and trampled on it

played me for a fool goddamn you

took my strength confidence my soul from me

along with your soul

which I thought you had given me

(“we will never lose each other,

our souls are too connected,”

you’d said)

leaving me ashamed to be me

embarrassed to be alive

impotent

pathetic

so frightened so abandoned

and when I saw that you saw me like that

I was lost

contemptible

nothing anyone could love

a dirty spineless creeping creature

its begging bowl extended

begging you to love me

something to be kicked

Photo by Smithsonian on Unsplash

as once

so long ago

in that year of aimless hitchhiking

a sweet sad man with no toes

a kind of bumbler

(“frostbite,” he explained, laughing, self-deprecating —

“my own dumb fault,” still laughing, self-presentation complete)

in a cemetery in Bulgaria

was stumbling and skip-hopping over crooked headstones

through high-grown grass and

morning-sun-blowing clover-scented air

to show us his mother’s grave

his mother’s love

and we

lagging behind

laughing behind our hands &

focused on the empty spaces at the front of his sneakers

giggling covertly at the idea of stepping on them —

(it wouldn’t even hurt him!)

because we were cruel

because it was so sad it

seemed funny

that vulnerability

that need to show us

he’d been loved

to show us,

his new American friends,

safe for the moment

high on our own love

and heedless laughter

where everything invited our happy hilarity

activated hidden sadistic streaks

(not mine, maybe? but I went along)

and puerile stupidity

Forgive me, sad Bulgarian man

I despise the me you couldn’t love

I don’t want that me-myself you didn’t want —

that me who could, if even for a split-moment,

awaken in you

a hidden disdain

for me

I have lived so long without you now

and so long with the me you couldn’t stand

I don’t want to live with me anymore

I don’t want to live without you anymore

It may be that I just don’t want to live at all

anymore

There’s a kind of love that won’t die

feeds on itself and what it’s endured

And it is burdened

so burdened by

fury pain doubt insult loss

that it is forever compromised

any pure memories muddied

lost among the bad

until it wants to die

to shut itself down

and up

and out

forever

Photo by Polina Khaiko on Unsplash

Forgive me sad Bulgarian man

for whatever hardness in me wanted to step on your soul