Loving yourself in pieces

Self-love is a tall order - a skyscraper to climb over, without ropes - when you're used to beating yourself up on behalf of other people. You know, to save yourself the effort of feeling the shock and bruise of it, the next time it starts. When a fight with yourself leaves you lying bloodied on the ground.

So the answer isn't a must, a giant should, an impossible goal. Start small. Start somewhere.  Start with the marvel of your hands gripping a door handle. With the way your lungs keep fluttering without your thought to guide them. Start with your strong legs that carry you everywhere, even when you're tired and angry and aching.

Start with the pieces of you that someone has loved before (but maybe you didn't really believe them). Look in a mirror and find one thing beautiful. What did they tell you about your eyes? Maybe the way your neck curves into your shoulder, the way your hair falls over your ears. Has someone loved the sound of your voice? The way you put words together carefully before they come out of your mouth? Start with what they told you your smile did to them.

Start with the things you think you're not supposed to love. Start with the way you insist on loving someone that you've been told you should give up on. With your resistance and stubbornness. Start with your obsessions. The way you have to straighten up the cutlery on a table, just so. And the way you keep your anger to yourself, because you don't want to burn anyone else with it. Start with your clumsiness, your sensitivity, your hurry, your yearning.

You are loved and lovable just as you are. You don't have to believe it. You don't even have to feel it, in your bones or your belly. But it's true, you are lovable. I promise.

Still the girl

This week three men wanted me. My year turned on the hinge of their desire.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

My answer, three times.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl on the beach with thighs twelve years too large, flesh bulging against the chicken-wire gaze of her father and uncle? My bicycle dubbed the gate to acceptability, to shrinking those meaty fillets down to a size that might make me invisible to scorn.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl, fifteen with billboard breasts proclaiming the ripeness of my sex to every man that passed. Before I had learned how to open the long library vault of my mouth. How everyone in a foreign country thought I was my father's wife, in that daisy dress made for a church I no longer believed in?

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl in the warehouse, far from home. Seventeen so green, not a colour a person should ever be. His twice-my-age fingers moved like vine tendrils, brushing my waist, tucking in the tag of my shirt. Into my body a tree trunk, like my sapling self had always belonged to him. Curled in my grandmother's shower with shame.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I am still the girl, twenty-one and never kissed. The first time, my teeth were bars and I did not want to unlock them. His kisses tasted like ash and held a key to the library he would never enter.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl twenty and eight, when moan was just a word and pleasure an idea. Whose virginity became a trophy she was tired of carrying, fox-weary of the steeplechase, the sniffing hounds. So threw it to a pale-fleshed creature who did not understand how twinned desire and fear can be.

I am not for you.

Don't they know I'm still the girl whose no turned limp, fell like a body in a waterfall when he pushed and pushed again. Drowned when he said it was my fault. Two years gone and I'm breathing again but the timber of my belly is still waterlogged.

I am not for you.

Don't they know, I'm still the girl with a canyon named father in her chest? With a trickle, a creek called love in that chasm signed man. With a bear in the belly of that canyon. She roars at all the strangers stumbling in. There is no haven in this body, this tree trunk is not home.

I am not for you.

To the men that wanted me this week, and the ones that are waiting for me next week and the ones after that.

You can't fill in my canyons with the soil of your masculinity. There isn't enough of you to make it solid ground again. Didn't anyone teach you how earthquakes work?

When it rains, sometimes the creek floods. Sometimes the canyon is full and love washes the stone ledges clean. There are always traces of earth left behind. Maybe we can plant a garden in the crevices together, grow something that hasn't been here before.

You can't fuck my history out of me, can't rescue me from fires that razed long before you arrived. I have not been waiting safe in a tower for you and your steed. I have not been waiting. I have not been safe.

Forests always grow back after fires.

We can't dance if you are always stepping forward. If you move in the only place I can breathe is away. Don't chase me into the canyon.

I am still the girl that dances on the Sabbath day. Dances at midnight. Twirls in her skirts and howls at the sickle moon.

This is a language I understand. How it begins is how it ends.

If I am for you, remember the girl. Learn her too. I am the bear and the canyon and the flood and still the girl.

Lessons in love

It's Christmas Eve. I am lying on a single bed in a hotel room, hours from the city I currently call home. My mother is snoring eloquently on the next bed over. She'll probably be surprised by her own tiredness when she wakes up. She'll ask if she snored, knowing that the answer is always a (fond) yes.

This place is overripe with our family history, with memories of the harshness and trauma and scrambling out and recovery that has shaped 3 generations of us already. We hope it won't reach the 4th, the tender ones sprouting now.

We have had some heavy conversations, the kind that rest in the pit of your stomach for hours afterwards, like pebbles. Maybe we are those birds that swallow small stones to help their digestion. We swallow heavy truths, turn stories over in our guts, to help us digest life.

I just finished off the remains of a Christmas Toblerone that melted into one big triangular blob in the heat on the drive here. It was a gift, from only a few days ago. The chocolate was a little too sweet. The air conditioning is a little too cold, contrasting with the country heat that is visible outside the window. The bed is a little too saggy. I have music tucked in my ears. I have been crying, a little. I have stopped, a little.

I've learned a lot about love this year. And grief: it's sister, it's other-coin-face. What it is, what it isn't. How easy it is to feel it, open myself up, show it to people that I think can feel it too, reciprocate. How it can scratch up the lining of my organs when it's mixed up with copious quantities of fear, with expectations, ideas of perfection that I humanly, inevitably fail to meet. How long it takes those tender parts to recover from such short, mismatched unions. Yet I find myself feeling grateful for each one anyway. The moments of joy like sugarcubes dissolving on the tongue; the easing-bruise memories of hurt; the lessons scribed into the skin with invisible ink; the scars that itch at the scent of rain.

I keep finding new people to love, and new ways to love, loving bigger. I used to be afraid that I'd never love again when someone left, when something ended. That I'd used up the bucket of love, and it took such a long time to fill it up again, in drips and trickles. But now it doesn't run out. It seems to grow all the time, spill over. And a new love doesn't change or diminish the ones that came before it. It's possible to love dozens, even hundreds of people simultaneously and not explode or feel stretched thin.

And loving other people means accepting them as they are. Not as they were, or could be, or should be, or how it would suit me. Who they are right now.

This month I wrote over a dozen love letters to my friends and family, acquaintances. I let the recipients choose themselves. Anyone who said "yes please" when I shared the idea. Some were a surprise to me.

One was for a man who I know almost nothing about. We are acquaintances, friends of the Facebook variety, spinners in the same circles. After he read the letter, he looked at me like he wanted more, held me tighter when we said goodbye. I hadn't thought about the ripples my words would create, what would come back to me.

One was for a friend I've never said the L word to before. It's been a few years now since we met and she's proved herself repeatedly to be one of the kindest, steadiest, most understanding people, drawing closer to my side as I've faced experiences that scared others away.

One was for the only sister I have. We seem to adore and misunderstand each other in equal measure. I'm still composing that letter, sorting through the chaff of our shared history in search of the grains of love that will root down our future selves.

One was for a man who won - and broke - my heart as this year began. After our months apart - unspeaking, grieving, avoiding, both stumbling in and out of dances with other people - he still fumbles with my love like it's a dreadful and coveted fire, a thing that will burn him to the ground. Maybe it would have.

I don't know the ending to all this. I don't know how my story continues, except that there's a lot of love in it somewhere. Maybe everywhere. Looking back, I can see glimpses of all the paths I didn't take, the hearts I left behind, these lessons in love, the woman I would have become if I'd stayed. I keep choosing a future I can't see, a path no one else seems to be taking.

It's Christmas Eve. I am lying on a single bed in a hotel room, hours from the city I currently call home. I have cried a lot this year. I have loved more.

When a man tells you...

When a man tells you your mouth was made for his
It's okay to get weak all the way down to your knees, even your toes
You should swoon and let him kiss you more, and again
Just remember your mouth is the cave
and he has not yet met your blind words
Flying out of the darkness to meet the twilight outside

When a man says that your bodies were made to fit
You are allowed to believe him, to measure
the intersections of your limbs. To mould
your yielding flesh to his questing hands
First, make sure he has heard you howl
That he sees the strength in your bones
the vastness of your hungry mind
the crone looking out from your eyes

When a man says that he wants to love you
You can want him to. You can yield
surrender to the roar in your chest
But learn first what keeps your precious
fires burning, and steady. The difference between
"I don't want to lose you" and "I want to keep you"

He believes you are moths to each other's  flame
But yours is the fire of the stars

'Moth and flame' by Dynasthai

Bloody

There is poetry in my
body but I can't get it out
it fills my thirsty veins
pushes through the chambers
of my livid heart, gives me
headaches when I sleep
the only way
to get it out is to break
the skin

I have spent the
time since you healing these
canyon wounds and the scars
make a landscape of my flesh
like ink bleeding into
paper they tell stories holding in
memory long as mountains

Yet my blood sings to
be freed again to be seen
who will pierce me next to
hear its siren call, the bloody
thump of my tireless heart?
will they leave me stained
with my own carmine poetry
or join their eager blood with mine?

How to open a closed book

Don't tell me I'm too serious, that I need to have more fun. Don't shame me into trying to change, to be different to what I am.

Show me.

Share it with me.

Take me dancing until our breath runs away from us... then we'll chase it down and start again.

Let's buy popping candy buried in chocolate and eat it all, listening to the sound of rain exploding in our mouths.

Talk to me with irresistible curiosity, ask the questions that no-one has asked me before. Savour the answers.

Take me walking under the full moon, with our hands touching and tenderness in your eyes.

Show me the funniest movie you know and hold your hands lightly on my ribs while I shake with laughter.

Kiss me out of my moods and dive with me into small happinesses.... the sun on bare arms and the smell before a summer storm.

Let me rest when the world gets too much. Watch me sleeping because you can't help yourself.

Show me what it means.

Share this with me.

A warning for my future lover/s

Be careful of taking a poet for a lover
for she cannot wear her love in silence

She will catalogue the flaws in your skin
and the reasons she finds them there
the flow of your breath when you sleep
and your exhalations when you make love
the soft dough of your face when you wake
the rumble of your laugh spilling over
the wonder of finding in the dead of winter
that her hands are always warmer than yours

She will tell everyone about the way that
(despite your worldliness and machismo)
you kiss her mouth as if you can’t help yourself
of the way your thoughts simmer and surface
surprising, like bubbles in hot mud pools
and always she will write, of you, of herself
trying to find better and better words for
the mystery, the matter that binds you together

Be careful of taking a poet for a lover
for what a poet loves she must write

Unrequited oceans

Love is a compulsion for collision. An unavoidable drive to meet, to crash into an other. To press lives and mouths and yearnings together until it cracks us open. Because sometimes it's the only way to get it out, to cope with the swell of the oceans inside us.

This is love, for me, perhaps just for today. (Mixed metaphors because one will never do for this). I won't always think so. It's not all I think. But I am cracked open and I'm afraid it's for the wrong person, again. I made the choice. I just need to understand it.

Tonight I was driving in the rain and my face started to match my windscreen: streaked with rivulets of wet. I drove until there was somewhere quiet to stop and then I curled against the steering wheel and heaved with the ocean in me.

I grieve not for a loss, but for the love I've never had. For needing these minor collisions to recognise the vastness of myself. For having to be cracked open before I realise that it is unrequited. That the swell coming back the other way is not from a meeting with another ocean but my own waves bouncing off a wall.

There's no half-life on love

The woman I am/sleepwalking

I have a crush on someone at the moment. The kind where I sometimes drop something I'm carrying just because  this person smiles at me. The kind where I forget how to be the intelligent, mostly articulate adult I usually manage to be. An infatuation that persists despite (or perhaps because of) my attempts to logic myself out of it.

I haven't had one for a long time. I have to stop and calculate how long it's been since I felt this way. When it comes to looking for a partner or 'finding love' (that phrase still puzzles me, for I don't know how or where to look) I have been sleepwalking. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes just out of long habit.

It chagrins me somewhat to realise that in this, I feel as much my awkward adolescent self as ever. My best friend reassures me laughingly that this is normal, that it never goes away. And perhaps that is the point.

The woman I am is the girl I was. I have learned, I have grown but I also stay the same. If I am to be loved, I must be known wholly. If I am to be known I must not hide the parts of myself that might not fit with the facade, with an idea of who I should be or how I might be more loveable.

I can't tell jokes because I always forget them. My most comic moments are usually unintentional. I shake my fist at the sky in mock frustration.

I watch Star Trek tv marathons on Thursday nights. If I had to choose a favourite movie character it would be Amelie. I go to poetry readings alone and don't talk to anyone unless they talk to me first.

I shave my legs even though I don't believe I should have to, because I've never outgrown the horror of having my leg hair pointed out by school bullies.

As a university student, I started cutting my own hair with sewing scissors. I still do (with better scissors).

I throw my head back when I laugh. My laugh sounds more and more like my mother's. She is one of my best friends.

I flinch when people honk their car horns, and the imprint of it stays with me for hours. I drive a little pink car and snarl under my breath at bad drivers.

I can read a good novel in less than a day. I've been writing poetry for 18 years.

How much knowing is needed before it turns into love?

Love is not enough

I've had this idea rolling around in my mind for a few months, about love and how we know it. I believe strongly that the feeling of love may be unconditional, but relationships should not be.

My childhood taught me that love is not enough, because people commit all sorts of atrocities in the name of love.  Love lets you accept awful things from the people you care about.  Love is what we call it when people who aren't good for each other stay together. Love is what lets families cluster around people who have done someone else harm, and protect them regardless of innocence or guilt.

But love is not enough. The feeling of it, the words we call it. The language of love is useless and insulting without acts of love to accompany it.  Acts of love are not standalone behaviours that we can cast about and say 'here is proof of my love'.  Love is always contextual, always matters in light of what has gone before.

Staying with someone is not always an act of love, and leaving them sometimes is.  Rage is not an act of love, but the right kind of anger can be.  Pouring out the flimsy words we use to describe love can be an act of love as much as it can be an act of violence, of manipulation, or of selfishness.

It's all too easy to list all the things that love isn't, to talk about why love isn't enough.  All of us can list the things that others do that make us feel unloved.  Lots of people are good at seeing when they aren't being loved in "the right way".  But that doesn't help us know it when we see it, when it's in the room with us.

I may not have been loved by any man, but I surely know what a woman's love is.  I know what women's love is capable of. I know the love that I am capable of.

The vomit episode

In February this year I spent a week with my best friend Amy and her boys (my annual trek to South Australia for her birthday).  


The pinnacle of my visit was the night before I was due to travel back home.  I was sitting on the couch, dividing my attention haphazardly between the local tv station and giggling at Facebook updates.  She disappeared for a while, only to return and deposit crying, nappy-clad baby in my lap. 


After only 5 days slotted quietly into her life, I found myself constantly alert for the sound of a baby’s cry, swaying and rocking without thinking about it and adjusting rather easily to the concept that the new centre of my world was this delightful boy child.


So, baby in lap, I immediately commenced rocking, patting, shushing to the best of my ability.


I was standing in the middle of the lounge when it started.   Amy walked past in a bit of a hurry, said ‘I think I know what’s wrong with him’.  A moment later he stopped crying, made a peculiar noise and emitted a small blurp of warm, wet liquid onto my shoulder. 

So far, so good.  I knew babies throw up, I knew clothes could be washed. I considered it a sign of my maturity (not to mention my vast knowledge of parenting) and my love for this little creature to accept the state of things, namely that I had just been vomited on.


Amy trotted over and said ‘you might need this’, and deposited an aptly-named spew rag on my already soaked shoulder.  I was still congratulating myself on being calm in the face of baby spew when she grabbed my elbow and said ‘quick, come out into the hallway’.


I had just stepped off the carpeted part of the floor when Baby anointed me again; this time a deluge.  It ran down my back, under the waistband of my jeans and into my underwear, flowed across my chest into my bra, trickled down my arm, splashed on the floor.


At the time I was quite proud of myself.  I didn’t flinch, I didn’t drop the baby, I didn’t yell ‘EWWWW GROSS!” at the top of my lungs.  I did say, quietly, “I think Aunty Nicole is going to need a shower”.   Amy covered herself efficiently with a towel or two, took Baby from my arms (with a smothered giggle at my facial expression), and I fled to the bathroom, barely keeping down my own dinner. (It was just the smell, and there were bits with texture….)


While in the shower, removing baby vomit from my hair (to this day I don’t know how it got in my hair, on the opposite side to the arm I was holding him with), I was suddenly wracked with guilt.  Here I was hogging the shower, shampooing my hair, having left my best friend sitting in the hallway with a vomit-covered baby.  I hurried to finish the shower and emerged from the bathroom, fresh and apologetic.


While Amy and Baby showered, I cleaned up the floor and did my best to make up for my lapse in selflessness.  As we laughed about it afterwards, she told me that this just meant Baby really loved me.

turning medusa

before, I was hopeful
full of nerves and poetry
your laugh made me wish
I was funnier than I am
your words drew me in
fueling yearning, spinning tales

up close you were smaller
yet you spoke of large dreams
and the man you might become
confused, I opened myself wide
and you took out your pleasure
leaving only consequences
leaving me with old tears
and a swelling rage

when fathers and husbands
rape and curse and injure
when brothers abandon
their faith and their sisters
who am I to offer all
my fire and my weakness?

when love is danger
and trust is ruin
what can I turn to
but to stone?