journey song #25:
awake in the dark
my boyfriend's lover left him last night.
I write the words and then stare at them,
wondering what to add to make this
seem the train wreck it is.
I doodle in the margins and add a note
about her age 18 & unbeautiful, needy,
demanding. I don't add the bit about
how she acted if she had a perfect right
to depose me. I do not write about
how his love inspired my hate.
I write instead about how relieved
I am that she is gone, how angry he is
with her, how I am minding my silence
and only gloating to myself. I do not
write about how the air smelled different
this morning, without the glaze of pain
that has coated everything for three months.
I mention that the knowledge of her presence
and her need has lain between us for too long,
the rotten center of all my attempts
to reconcile myself to living shieldless.
He called us both his girlfriend;
I'll remember that later, when the dust
of what is between us chokes, when
I write the words that will follow
me into silence. She was a battle,
he and I are a campaign, a siege,
a field where the casualties are
lying open to rot. And all the secret
assumptions.
March 18, 1998