Going Through Thoughts After My Mom’s Death [a poem] (+ link to see slideshow)

Hi, it is now after midnight in my timezone, but it was Saturday, June 27th, 2020, which would’ve been my mom’s 58th birthday and which seemed like a good day to power through and finish writing the poem I started the first week in February.

If you’d like to see the memorial slideshow I made for my mom, I’d be happy to share it in a temporary download link.

I followed advice I found via Googling to use her own handwriting from the backs of photos and scan those too for the slideshow, to caption photos so people can tell who they’re looking at, etc.

I discuss the slideshow in my poem below, a poem I started writing while I was still in the process of creating the slideshow. So without further ado, this is a start to some of my thoughts in the aftermath of my mother’s death.

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Going Through Thoughts After My Mom’s Death

Going through shots for a memorial slideshow
Many of two toddlers and their youthful glow
Christmas morning, playtime, in others’ arms, etcetera
But I’m looking for the woman behind the camera

Her love for her children wasn’t a ruse
But laws aren’t equipped to prevent all types of abuse
In another life, she might’ve been a good mom
Might’ve been equipped with patience, joy, and calm

So evident in the pictures is her affection
Toward unexpected people, the flash in their direction
She photographed her husband long after they separated
Sisters, brothers, those to whom she was related

She held onto images mailed from an in-law or a friend
Occasionally she herself appeared, her smile not pretend
It certainly is not the part of her I remember best
I recall her as always bitter, angry, and depressed

27 [a poem]

When I was little,
I thought about heaven
Grown up, I’d just dwell
On the number 27

My abuser’s birthdate,
Age she became parent
My age when gunshots
Caused deaths most aberrant

The same exact date,
Only three years prior
A girl was strangled,
A murder transpired

Friend of my brother,
She away at college
Thanksgiving evening;
Horror to acknowledge

I didn’t know her.
Then 2017,
Another stranger,
Another graphic scene

November 27th,
My friend had shot his spouse
Spared his dogs and kids;
Did it in their own house

Him suicidal,
His thinking far from clear
Did something evil;
Caused sorrow and tears

Learning to See Experiences Related to Asexuality as Potentially “Poetic”

This is my submission for the October 2018 Carnival of Aces, which had the theme “Poetry”.

I apologize for any autocorrect typos, I wrote this whole thing on my phone. Let me know kindly and I can fix them.

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Two years ago, in September 2016, I wrote a prose poem about my asexual experience without really realizing I was writing poetry again. (“Again”, because I hadn’t written any poetry in 4.5 years, since my Creative Writing class my final semester of college ended.) September 2016 was during that blip in time when Imzy existed and I was in the 100 words community, challenged to write exactly 100 words, no more and no less, on a different prompt each week.

The prompt that time was “Clocks” and somehow I ended up writing:

The concept was always framed with a presupposition; there would of course come a point in time when I’d be ready. When that time came, I needed to be armed with knowledge. I must brace for the emotional consequences. Itwas an inevitability.

So I learned. For over a decade of my life, I prepared. I absorbed more information than was really necessary. I planned ahead.

But society was wrong. Maybe all along I’d been a broken clock. I’d felt stuck. I tried to push myself forward.

As it turns out, though, I am the flower doomed to never bloom.

I am still not entirely sure if it counts as a poem. But writing about an asexual experience with metaphors and without ever once using the word asexual seemed poetic somehow to me.

It was a start of something.

A key concept from those hundred words made it into a stanza of my new poem, No “Just” About It that I wrote two years later in September 2018 — just last month (as of the time of me writing this blog post) — and which was published in The Asexual (edit/update: AZE Journal now), a literary journal. My second piece of writing to be published in one of the issues of this journal but my first poem.

https://azejournal.com/article/2018/9/28/no-just-about-it

This poem is kinda… Political. It’s also fun. We’re often our own harshest critics but to me it seems apparent that it’s not very impressive from an artistic standpoint. But I’m glad I decided to write it, and I didn’t let the genre of poetry intimidate me away from something relatively simple like this.

If The Asexual didn’t exist as a platform I never would’ve thought to write poetry with asexual themes so I’m very grateful to Michael Paramo and everyone there who keeps it running.

From 2004 through 2008 when I was ages 14 through 18 and in high school, all four years I participated as part of the literary magazine club after school. We accepted fiction but mainly received poetry and a little bit of art. Once a week after school our club would read aloud as a group, discuss the merits of, and also respectfully criticize each submission. They would be typed up to anonymize each submission ahead of the discussion, no author listed and no handwriting to recognize. We were always keeping in mind the possibility that the author could be one of us in the room so we had to be careful not to be unkind in our criticism. (I don’t think the visual art pieces needed to be discussed; I think maybe they automatically got in.)

Aftermath [a poem]

This is related to my two recent blog posts on a certain subject. Ideally the prose poem could stand alone without you even knowing the context of my blog posts.

Check out the content notes over here at this one: https://luvtheheaven.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/unpacking-some-of-the-extreme-distress-i-experienced-last-week/ if you are concerned you might want content notes for my poem, and feel free to read my blog posts either before or after you read this poem I wrote.

I started a couple lines of this poem within that very first week but kinda had to start fresh as my feelings evolved. I wrote this late at night Sunday December 10th before going to bed and later that week edited it a little after receiving feedback from an acquaintance in an online informal writing group. I thought it might still be edited more but now I’m thinking this is probably the final draft of it.

I may write more poems on the subject, on different emotions, or a more updated way to express where I’m at. Poetry feels like a good medium right now.

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Aftermath

It isn’t really like you
To hurt people
Or was it? Was this always who you were?

It’s taken me time to accept
we’re in the
Aftermath
of this horror.

“We” being me, and your other friends, and your family.

(Not you. Not anymore.)

Because when you made the choice, you trapped me
in the
Before.

Was I fortunate to live on the east coast?
Free from the danger you posed?
Was this really Freedom?

I started crying here.
But days passed before the crying was because you were dead.

What a shame. The people who loved you, not one of us, can ever simply be sad you’re dead. You. You made this about… everything else imaginable, but not really that.

Grief isn’t ever simple, regardless.
But if you had died, and that was all? It would be infinitely better.

Death isn’t better than much.

But
this example plainly illustrates how
your friend Dying by His Own Choice
isn’t actually the worst thing that can happen.

I feel like I’m lying by omission unless I say the part that happened first.

You were crying there.

You told me for a month.
Not sleeping.
At your lowest point in your life right now.
Dreading Christmas.
Dreading every task of every day.
You even implied all the feelings of Shame.
(Avoiding telling anyone why you quit.)
(Only telling me a week later because of guilt, like you really owed your professional partner an explanation and not explaining had been unfair. You and her, ninety-five percent chance of Divorce.)
(Only telling me you had been struggling with alcohol after another a length of time passed.)
(And there was that added context in your tone of voice too.)

Yes.
I heard you loud and clear.
You said it all.

And I offered all my commentary.

“Other people go through this too.”

“My parents had a worse situation than you and her. I truly believe getting divorced within months is better than the decade and a half of no legal agreements, which as a child, I survived.”

Your situation looked better
from my side of the fence.

I kinda knew the grass is always greener on the other side.

Maybe my comments missed the mark. But at least I tried.

At least I said something.

I tried to convey
Divorce Sucks
and I was sorry.

If only I knew…

No.
I didn’t hear even a muffled whisper.
You didn’t say anything at all.
Through my own tears, I realize now how you never mentioned if you were crying.
(You even said you weren’t suicidal.)

You acted relatively calm about her. You were upset at the thought of seeing her.

However.

You had honestly hoped to save this marriage not too long ago.

I guess in the most twisted of ways, you did prevent a divorce from being finalized.

I offered my helpless sympathy.

I openly expressed I wished she wasn’t seeing another man,
wished you weren’t going through this,
wished I could do more.

You said you knew all these things from me.
You said Thank you.
You acted kind. Appreciative of my sentiments.

I assumed you knew I wasn’t the best person to comfort you.
You had to have known.
My longest romantic relationship spanned such a fraction of your marriage.
My years of being alive such a fraction of your life.

You didn’t scare me at all.
(You didn’t reveal any of your anger.)
You… cracked another joke about Texans and them not having heard of winter coats.

You’ve now made it hard for me to look at my winter coat.

You’ve already missed the snow that came to San Antonio this December.

You would’ve had so much to say about it.

But I guess you’ve missed this entire December too, now haven’t you?

You will miss all Decembers from now on.

And so will your wife.

And your kids will never look at anything the same I’m sure. Snow or Decembers or Sadness or Divorce.

There are too many reasons I’ve been
Crying
Both Here and There.

There.
Yes.
I should mention:

I finally made it to Texas.

When you decide to orphan your children it suddenly gives me a reason for a journey.

If I had known it would save the course of five lives…

Would I have come sooner?

Would I ever have believed I needed to be there for you?

Would it have possibly even helped?

Sometimes it really was like you
To hurt people
To hurt my feelings
To make me doubt myself
To make me cry

But you were trying to help the world
You cared about making it a better place
A safer place
Less scary
And more fun too

We had gotten past our disagreements.

It isn’t really
like you hurt me too.

When I say five lives
I mean you, plus
Your poor wife
Who, it should go without saying,
Didn’t Deserve This
And your three daughters.
Who also Didn’t.

And we all keep saying it anyway.
Because what else is there to say?
Apparently you didn’t realize this.

In the end, it was so much more than five lives.

It is such a huge number of us.
This ripples out more painfully than you would have dreamed, even when you were in your right mind.

So today
I’ll remind you of just one more.

You really hurt me too.

 

Falling

Imzy is shutting down. I want to preserve these little original writing things I did for the 100 words community so I’m reposting them here on my blog. The prompt at the time for this one was “Fall”.

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In my life, there have been multiple instances where I’ve felt embarrassed – in fact, where I’ve felt lesser as a person! – simply because I had the misfortune of tripping and falling. Sure it makes sense to not want to fall. Literally being hurt in a physical way is, indeed, negative. Becoming skilled at avoiding injuring the only body we get is an important skill if we want to survive. But my instinctual first reaction? “Oh no; other people can judge me right now.” This shame seems illogical and problematic. I wonder… Do I shame others when they fall?

100 Words of Prose, Prompt: Clocks

The concept was always framed with a presupposition; there would of course come a point in time when I’d be ready. When that time came, I needed to be armed with knowledge. I must brace for the emotional consequences. It was an inevitability.So I learned. For over a decade of my life, I prepared. I absorbed more information than was really necessary. I planned ahead.

But society was wrong. Maybe all along I’d been a broken clock. I’d felt stuck. I tried to push myself forward.

As it turns out, though, I am the flower doomed to never bloom.

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(I wrote this for the 100 words community on imzy in September 2016. Posts had to be exactly 100 words and the prompt that week was “Clocks”. The post was untitled, I decided to share it here now. Didn’t feel like coming up with a title.)