It’s not that I want to be like this.
It’s just that I exist in bits — cells I can’t quite contain.
And if I can’t, then who can?
Once I was offered a ring and I thought,
What would happen if I committed to him
In a legal and public way?
Would I suddenly take shape?
Form a new skin to keep my clutter in?
Would I become stronger, more capable in union?
A weight to stop me floating into the abyss.
I wanted to step inside a white dress
And feel the silk meld to my white flesh
To contain me, to root me to reality.
A soul to love, to love me back and
A hand to hold, always, in our frequent states of
Disarray.
Ten years should have been enough to know one another;
I didn’t even know myself.
We came apart in a thousand lethal shards
Inside the tight sheath of matrimony.
Love, that formless force
Slowly bled out without much fuss
Sapped by his sadness, stubbornness and lies
And my preoccupation with other lives.
Of course I ripped through the
Fabric,
Woven by another hand
In another time.
I always knew about the whore who lives inside
Every madonna to varying degrees.
It intrigued me, the idea that
We should give ourselves to softness
And quell those primal energies, those
Delicious vulgarities
With creamy colours and preoccupations
With domestic activities.
Marriage isn’t frivolity; it takes sincerity, strength,
Faith, foundation, integrity,
Self-sacrifice,
A trade-off I thought I could make.
It was my biggest mistake,
Preceded by a strange and antiquated ceremony
That in its preciseness and pomp
Took on a kind of silliness,
A sense that we were playing an imaginary game:
Two children in costumes
Making grand promises
We could never keep.
