The raw emotions of a woman
A poetic journal about a lost woman finding her way.
By Suzanne Steinberg
Published by Black Sheep Productions
Copyright 2015 Suzanne Steinberg
Smashword Edition
Table of Context
Imaginary relationship
Pressure
Chinese Takeout
What we learn as children
Two plus two equals four
Assumptions
Kyle
Insanity
Silence
Drawing mountains on the wall
The eye who knows me by heart
Society
A boy I met with a superman notebook, who lost his family
Grains of salt
Innocence
Mindless chatter
The inner voice
Slipping on intimacy
Hiding
Games we play
The women in waiting
Walls
Fantasies
Womanhood
The cycle of pain
Being broken
Hate
Pretty Houses
Caught on someone else’s hope
Married women
Compliance
The men who I have loved
Imaginary relationship
How do you believe in a make believe relationship, those squishy inside moments that only memories re-live as telepathic intimacy? How do you rectify the silence of too many years passed when you justified a generic symbol as love? How do you accept the inhibited smile of walking barefoot in a water fountain screaming out to the clouds of childhood that evaporate years ago, but so close it almost drips down the glass as liquid? How do you see yourself as any different then you are, the monsters that crawls around ideas, the inner life that you throw away for a foot in the door? How do you love that, the shadows you predicted at birth and painted on the walls with fingers tips, singing lullabies to dolls? How do you find the inner strength to stand in the past of wasted opportunities without any eyes, and only the nothingness of it happening, only the reasons and reactions and the faceless words that follow you around telling you their position on the argument? Those ceaseless raw emotional words of someone else that got crammed in your ear one day, so far down that in silence they have their very on stage, and in winter around the dead trees covered with dirt, they are the only warmth. The two sided face of love, the belief in someone’s paper thin promises, the belief in a nightmare as you hold yourself awake thinking eventually it will change, eventually the tap dance of love on a vacant street will be special, it will be what you thought it was, it will be what it is supposed to be, but in the imagination everything is what it is supposed to be.
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Pressure
Feet being pushed into shoes, smiles being sown onto faces, love being disguised as meaning again, telling you who to be, who has the rights to your affection, controlling you softly through the cracked voice of a mother who is nowhere to be found, through the soft memories of a father who you constantly dream about, and you sow yourself shut to sit alone in a room full of strangers pretending to be a doll, pretending to be the person that is soul-less, mimicking TV commercial statements, paradises on computer screens, songs that can’t leave your head, people’s footprints that you follow up the walls like wall paper. You close your eyes holding yourself into this mold of woman, this supposed to be doll face of sexual desire that comes so close to real even her hair grows, this plastic perception of a helmet that ever so neatly looks like a face, a voice with a reaction and a subtle comment about life, a could be half is, who smiles because she has nothing to says. And the stuffing creeps out more and more in the birthday massacre.
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Chinese Takeout
Who am I supposed to be at every age, or the minute before I was born, was I supposed to be someone then, someone who had an agenda walking through life with a purpose that was more important than the pitfalls and dead ends that society seems to be known for, the mistakes someone else made that you hear about over dinner in a foreign restaurant where half of the people are from another country you can’t pronounce? Is there supposed to be a pause of interest in-between the millions and ones stranger’s faces I have begun to know by heart who all carry the same conversations with the same tones just swooping out the nouns and verbs? The broken bubble that seems to drift off into another dimension where people question their own voice, did I mean to say that, they ask walls, do I really sound like that, is that me again, the repetitive question, is that me? The strangeness of knowing yourself through the eyes of too many people whose tongue is stuck on the half dissolved aspartate that replaces sugar. Do you know me, we ask one another as we subtly change, cocoon again, reverse, remorse, find the guilt behind a book and a locket that was stuffed there? Is there a direction as we bubble back to the easy going life style of compliance and who is who in our power hungry directional perspective of constant production. Is there another you, we ask the million yous all in the way? Can there be another one, just one more, just one tiny one more, so I can feel small with you, this little slim door that has opened up behind your head again, that dotted gray blue line that we can dance upon in thought thinking it was all made up, even our hearts can laugh away our lives through a theoretical predicament, we can just laugh it all away with one solid breath, one more version underneath the solid stare of an unknown place we all go back to.
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What we learn as children
The head-ducking of another age that has gotten stuck to our mind, like glue and tooth picks all wrapped in a ball matted on the side of some girls head who fell asleep in the sewer beside the drug addicts and the lost souls, again. The smile that lost itself from being washed off a face too many times, in an upside down moment, while a little girl in a white dress twirled beside a music box and a grandmother’s dreams. There will be people there says the villains who push the mind back again, the irreplaceable irreversible bubble that we find ourselves bouncing off of for a neutral story, to love all human kind as long as we don’t have to personally know them, the before we forget as we barely hang on beside white bath-tubs and hand shakes, and the flame of love dies in a man’s eyes, the man we loved before we met him, the because it will happen that girls put on makeup and mothers tell their daughters how lucky one day they will be, just wait as we hold on tight to fight against the war of empowerment and superficial compliments, all the pain will matter once someone finally worships you. Keep fighting say the demons as they finger over porn in day dreams sitting on a toilet calling all women whores and bitches because we have bodies they will eventually be held accountable for when the dead pile up, and we cry endlessly sometimes the rivers and oceans and greed that hold us all apart, thinking a relationship with another person is a reflection of good deeds, a belief in beauty is the same as sacrifice as we all play an impossible game for accomplishment, while we are watched and guarded by the ever growing relationship.
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Two plus two equals four
You know this soul of a body you can never forget, your words laced within theirs as these imaginary moments unfold, this whose who, why not, why me, moments that you can’t take your eyes off of, as life moves forward like a babbling creek rushing over rocks, and you get stuck in those moments, those beliefs in God, the faith because all humankind is trustworthy, the I told you so, so it will never happen again moment, and you believe for a slit second in someone else’s eyes in an inner beauty that won’t ever die, in a life that is always floating off the ground, in an irreplaceable love that follows every hardship, and you love for a second, this powerfu
l unknown force of unconditional love, of every quirky every weird odd thought, and strange hair and beauty mark and innocent reply moment of love…and it comes so sweet like the drippings off an orange in the middle of the summer, it feels like friendship and watching the shapes in the clouds, and you take that moment and think it has to be, he has to do this, he has to love me back, he has to be with me forever, as life turns into a narrow one way street…and there only feels like one way out again, one way to break free, one way to turn around and be in the lazy ponds of half hearted thoughts and whimsical cares. And as you sit admiring someone else admiring who you thought you could be, this inside charm and belief that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you find how easy it is to change, how easy a second or a thought, or a string of long sighs can be forgotten. How it only takes one person to forget and look away, it only takes one. And everything that mattered, every moment in the sun, every longing look and high five and almost there, and belief of making something happen, and throwing yourself on a timeline of innocent replies thinking someone else was watching, it only takes one person to make something so beautiful become an embarrassment, something so healing become a mark of shame, a memory you can’t forget fast enough, a person who you can’t run away from. A horror of whose who and why me again, and you thought it would be different. It only takes one person.
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Assumptions
There are often a million people all stuck to the same person, the same in-between moment inside out, the because I want it to happen belief, and the we are stuck singing the same fairy tales, the same lives that have become so repetitive they are painful to re-live, they are painful to pretend to understand, because it feels too shallow. There are often a million and one people who say the same exact thing, the same exact thing. And in our era of communication we become fixated by it, the every moving clock, the ever understanding facial expression that swing around superficially like the time, like the repetitive laugh during a joke, and we fear what we don’t understand but we run there too, like detectives searching for answers, and like story tellers we become whisked away by the outline of other lives and the better beliefs. But it is a strange moment to realize the running and the questions and the social behavior we pride ourselves on, the broken hearts and shattered lives that we neglect or avoid and at times worship to try to heal, only stands upon the meaningless non-consequential ambivalent forgiveness of stranger’s accidents.
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Kyle
Are there more people were you come from, so many more that I can cover myself from them, pretend that they come from another time and make common day conversation about stupid mistakes that have become repetitive in our culture that we like to believe is fascinating? Can I lie to you, tell you my eye color is blue instead of hazel, tell you I am old instead of young, make you believe in me, even when I can only offer you empty words to dead ends? Can I tell you to be with me, cold and alone in a bed made for one instead of two, inside the night sky where the eyes have widened and closed on the edge of the ocean, on the edge of a hurricane developed years ago and a million lands away, when we were safe. Can we pretend to be safe? Away from humanity again, away from the people who knew my name before I was born and pretended to love me before I asked. Can we pretend to be old again? So old we are near the end of life and can get boundless sources of sympathy for doing nothing at all, laughing at how close to death we are, pretending to be doctors and higher professional and grant the respect of the nurses who were never ambitious to begin with. Can we pretend to be someone else again, someone who remembers everything, someone who will never forget, as we carve away the days and the nights on the wooden trees outside our lives, in the forest we have covered our skin so thick to see through that the owls seem to have eyes. Can we love again like we will never forget each other, you won’t just turn around one day in the middle of an empty classroom and pretend not to know me, you won’t laugh and I will smile behind a still piece of glass, and move on. Can we pretend to always remember, at least for just one more moment?
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Insanity
How innocent are you, the inner life the inner beauty, another person hiding underneath the seams, a second head, another mind, collecting facts like dust off the carpets and upholstery trying to find the sentiment in a lost cause moment hidden under the stars and forgotten about.
I see you watching me even though you aren’t here, The lips that have grown cold to me, as they chase me around on day dreams, following ever so closely with thoughts and whispers and illusions that tie me closer. And I challenge the dream of a man who wants to know me, but can’t. The belief in love as it comes through telephone calls and desires, but I claim that we are enemies, love and I. I claim it has been forsaken the tickling and talking and the taking me from behind my back, the subservient drowning in someone else’s path-tub as the water drips down my throat to where the fish will drown. I claim I am too good to love, the impossible irreversible sanity that has become wells in my eyes towards the nights of abandonment. That I am not what I seem, a ghost. A woman who has thrown up her internal life for glimmers of hope in dead end nights, reaching towards the abandonment all over again like a self-fulfilling prophecy like a forced contract with the devil and I will follow along dancing on the edge of a canyon as if I was made to, a doll with strings, I will paint his eyes blue and call him God, if only to fall down his will into an ocean of my own making, to run up against the waves like a child who has gone mad, like a lover who only lusts for moments, and I will run there as far as I can, into the deepest part of my own doing.
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Silence
Often there is nothing inside of me but the belief in you again, the needless silence that I have coated with my own whispers, the belief in purpose as I dress you up and down with outfits that I claim fit your identity. I call you my own in sleepless nights when I wonder where you are sleeping, and I claim I am no martyr as I touch the devil’s hand as we dance on the edge of life watching from another place, another man’s back, another dream. I call us together when you are clearly guarded, preaching your highest morality to strangers, as if confidence and a sales pitches changed reality, as if ego and acceptance could explain a limitation for only liking one type of person, or one object, one painting in a room of beautiful art work and cars, of beautiful women. I pretend to know you, in the zoo where you are caged, the people who pass between us, as we grow like trees intertwining branches and thoughts, leaves and flowers. I pretend to love you too, the innocence of love, the beginning as I am constantly chasing and concluding the end, wrapping it in a bow so it can make sense again, so the logic will be tuned with a pitch fork and a high melody. I pretend to love you daily, every day, every moment, I pretend as much as I can as I hit the walls and I force my feelings into these containable moments of chit chat over nothing, over walls shaped like eyes and irreversible silences. I create a nest for myself out of thin air through the sticks you throw my way, I try to make it in the in-between moments we never say that I am constantly waiting on, the belief, the fantasies of dirty thoughts and raunchy appetites, the beginning of the rainy season. I try to pretend love is more meaningful than this, than the broken down communication that has left the brown slush stuck. I like to believe within these walls between us there is this crack, there are these tiny grains of love that get through into a jar that is stored somewhere that will one day pour like sunlight into my life, but we all know I am the only one keeping track.
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Drawing mountains on the wall
I love you, you know, I tell myself every night. Thinking of the thoughts that echo somewhere else, in side of a room that is so much bigger than I want to admit to, the air that has gotten old and stale with the dust on the photographs. The beliefs that come around in the winter time, when lost love and hopelessness are charms on the necklace I wear. The belief in what people don’t say as it turns into monsters sometimes, the maybe they meant this, if I heard it correctly moments, or I turn the si
lence into angels and lovers, hoping to grab into hearts and steal back something I assume is mine, the covers over my bare bones that have caused me to shake at night from the cold. I live in a strange place of amusement of change as the world is constantly made a new, with new faces, new projects, new beginnings I assume, or old ones dressed up and refashioned like upholstery on couches. I sit alone thinking of who I want to be, who I was, as I find a solid place to land, a solid place behind my head and a thought, a world within myself that is quiet at night, the characters that dance around in my head have all gone asleep leaving behind the outline of the words we never say, the conversations I wish I could have but usually don’t, the belief in magic and innocence. I cry sometimes staring into the moon the castles I draw on the walls, the mountains I sometimes feel are too large to climb, the other people who I once knew who are waiting somewhere for the day I come back home. I stare at these far away lands, these dreams that I can barely remember, the world I used to know and I wonder how hard the climb will be on my own. I wonder what my worse days will be like, and I silently pray they are behind me. I wonder was it always supposed to be this way? Was it real, the face and the flesh and the moments in my mind, the people I have met, the dances and the games and the superficial lives we coat our tongues with, was it all the way it was supposed to be? Could I have changed something? But often even in silence surrounded by the walls, there is only the crushing of the sticks I have intertwined to make myself comfortable.
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The eye who knows me by heart
There is often an inner life underneath the skin, another person banging against the flesh the before we met and the never will see again, last line that comes around so effortlessly through the strangers who dance in superficial ponds, the before we know one another in the shadows of a naked room, hallowed out by the kind words we were taught in school, before words knew the outside world. “If we could only love effortless,” would say the neglect and intent mirrored inside our own minds, the lives before lives. The you before yous, as we circle around again back to the rattle and the million heads all growing from the same neck, all rehearsing again to be the same. I can be everyone claimed the million and one I can be you, you can be me, and I will be better at it.
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