Sugar Coated Saturdays

I am going to add a few poems today.  I wanted to start with 'Sugar' but I can't find it at the moment.  Let me explain.

My dear old friend, with whom I've had something of a falling out, told me my poetry and prose were worth keeping.  If I'm honest I can't exactly remember the justification for his words, but I recall it being something along the lines that they may be important one day (something of a joke between us) and they do track my path through the desolation of being abandoned and losing so much.  For those of you unaware, and if you've found the post you may know this, but if you're just pottering through a stranger's thoughts on a sleepless night you will not, that my husband left me just after my widowed father's diagnosis with terminal cancer.  My now ex-husband and I met when we were 18 and I regarded him as my best friend, lover and partner against the world.  Picking over the bones of a marriage failure is a grim affair because you cannot ever make sense of it, because you have the inexplicable outcome to justify: he left.  We were definitely in a difficult phase, and probably the worst thing is the fact that the memories have been re-written.  They have to have been, nobody in their right mind would have walked out on our marriage unless they deluded themselves it was terminal, the problems in escapable, the past so awful that the future could hold nothng but more of the same.  Of course he left for someone else, who he has now married.  It definitely feels like I'm one of the layers of a dream as so evoked by 'Inception', when I am ever going to climb up and out,  real life start up again?  With this in mind, I have a feeling it's going to be a 'how low can you get' sort of a day on the blog.

But to the poetry.  Most was written on my old laptop which after a couple of years sustained use died a good and valliant death.  The hard disk was saved and put on an external disk drive which I then dropped, making the data unrecoverable.  Unfortunately this happened at the same time when my dear old friend changed allegiances, or maybe showed his true colours, the jury is still out, and incomprehensibly not only went to the wedding of my ex-husband and his woman, but was the only non family member to be an usher and proposed one of the toasts, so I was told by my daughters upon their return from the day, beautiful and brittle with hurt that the nightmare did indeed appear to be an awful reality.  To add insult to injury he will not justify his action.  He was at school with my ex husband, and I had known him since I was 15, so we all go back a very long way.  He, who had seen my desolation in poem after poem, had sat with me as my will to carry on living was all but extinguished, had provided me with tea and company after I had been with my father at weekly chemotherapy sessions, he, who had offered to carry the coffin as a mark of respect for father.  I asked him for the poems back, but the disk he supplied would not work on my new, but second hand lap top.  I try, at intervals, to get him to explain his behaviour, but I come up against a blank wall.

The day of the marriage was a beautiful hot summer day, and I never, ever want to feel that desolate again.  Should my children pre-decease me I would imagine it might be quite a bit worse, but I'd rather not dare the universe to see how much pain it can inflict before I break, I have a sneaking suspicion the challenge might be maliciously and gleefully undertaken.

The dear old friend and I are speaking, of sorts, and he has gone to quite a lot of trouble to recover the archive of my works, which he deleted at my request following his change of allegiance, and he has promised to return the works to me.  I can find some of them via my own email archive, and in doing a bit of digging, looking for a poem called 'Sugar' I found something small I wrote which does explain the anguish.

The Cry


The bones of my soul
Have been stripped and washed
By your departure.
And they are dried,
Formed into a
Presentation of life
That looks good to others
But leaves me with just
Their hopes to live up to.
When will it matter to
Anyone but me?

16/07/2010

I try to remember to date the things I write, and in that dating I find patterns start to emerge.  This whole process seems cyclical.  There are good days, and for a long time I was sad inside and had to work for happiness.  Then sometime earlier this year it flipped and I was ok inside, just got miserable from time to time, and I really hoped I had turned a corner.  But with the wedding and other troubles, I find the happiness is just a coating once again, and I plod through life without a great deal of purpose or joy.  It could be that the winter is once more upon us, and I am managing to attribute the stresses of winter life in Suffolk to something more internal.  However, when you are trying to come to terms with the unthinkable, that the man you loved was going through the motions, that the truths you held in your heart were sham, it is really, really difficult to make sense of anything.  And so dear readers, I give you, Sugar.

Sugar


Just supposing,

I've had all the love due to me.

It is done.
And this heart that tries not to yearn
Is a design fault.

I was meant to be cold,
Or indifferent,
Or scheming,

Make the most of the guilt,
And the half hearts,
The promises meant
With best before dates.

Just God’s hand wobbled
Over the test tube,
A few grains split.

The spoonful went to another,
Who will always perplex
The other that loves him,
Why he doesn’t seem able
To dissolve into oneness,
As two souls do.

So they tell me.

Maybe that’s it,
God’s wobbly hand
Gives some of us spoonfuls,
Others just grains,
Of sweetness, so pure.

But all designed
To receive the full dose,
And nothing to tell us

Why indifferent could be better,

How cold would release us,
From the sentence unearned
Of a wobbling hand.
12/09/2010