Poetry to get in touch with feelings

[becomingbutterfly]

My T told me to consider how the abuse has made me feel. But my feelings associated with it are so separate from my memories of it. Then, when the emotional flashbacks hit, the pain is unbearable and overwhelming. It emerges in poems like these. They start with questions and confusion and fear of being honest, and then moving to really vulnerable truths with shame, anger, sadness, grief that's more than I can say.

Fetal Position:
sometimes my body is an unknown organism
a hurricane of thoughts slams into my temples
pictures of terror on a slide projector
but I am swept away in the torrential curent
fatigue weighing down my skin like sandbags
even the thought of wetting my lips is exhausting
where has this weather attacked from
why so threatening? why so deadly?
so i lie prone like a rainsoaked creature
waiting for the fear to drain
waiting for the fatigue to lift
waiting for the rescue to come
knowing that instead I will rise in the morning
and fight on.

Typewriter:
sometimes i ache to write
but the words don't come
they refuse to be etched
in typed ink and paper
as if black and white print
would make them real
like courier font gives
them credence and power
but the truth is
there is blood hidden
in the typed word

Flood:
I can feel the pieces of me falling
Shattering into a mosaic of
Fragile teacups, smashed, broken
It fuels my pen with hard pressed ink
To blot out the stains
That have destroyed my heart

Sometimes the pain pours from you
Like a rushing river of suffering
Sometimes it drips from you
Like a forgotten waterfall
But sometimes it’s just
A rainbow with every color of the light

The Shape of Pain:
No matter how I try, I cannot define this aching hole
Pain has no architectural frame to dismantle
You cannot hold suffering and weigh it on scales
Measurements cannot reveal its true size
Or in what period it was hollowed out
Tests cannot excavate the bones of my past
The desolation bleaches under the setting sun
I've tried to fill the void with happy feelings
In the arms of those who could not love me
With foods and chocolates, pleasures and excursions
But they are not the shape of my pain
These things have not smoothed edges and sharp sides
jagged cricks and open crevices like the hurts I have known
So now I am trying to embrace the ache
I am learning each shadow and contour
Molding the pangs with the sandpaper I keep in my backpocket
With music, warmth, service, love, wisdom, and truth
I may not ever come to know intimately the shape of
These many sufferings in the chasms of my soul
But beauty has a way of molding even the most
impossible of creatures into diamonds

Catastrophic Disaster:
Peel me off the ceiling
Where my anger has thrown me
Vaulting, heaving beams
Shrieking from the terror
Seething from the heat
Writhing from the pain
I possess the heat of a hundred volcanos
The strength of eight dozen earthquakes
I will pour and spew and scream
And all the world will suffer
All the world will suffer
The forests die and the grass dies and the flowers die
The animals flee before the ashes
Of my grief
Mountains move and rivers are filled
And again and again and again I fucking come
I. who was fucked by my own mother. I who exist.
I who am a volcano and a phoenix.
I crush the weight and drive away from J Street
I am Kong and I smash New York City
I am a tsunami and I crush the seashore
I am an earthquake and I level San Francisco
I am a volcano and I explode
Tick. Tick. Tick. I am a bomb
And I am bursting.
For I cannot protect one who will not be protected
One who is suffering
One who is mine
Well fuck you
You do not get to live this life
You do not get to claim this prize
You do not get to hold me
You will not hold him
Your hands will release him
And he will be free
Scarred, yes, though that is not my fault
But free
It is not holy to sacrifice your personal safety
For another’s impossible needs

[coconuts]

There are so many emotions there. I can relate to much if this.

I Think right now I am in a phase, well many of us are I guess, of trying to figure out the shape of our pain. It's like trying to find a bandaid that will fit the wound. But there is none. Many of us have tried to fill those wounds with so many other things.

The anger in the last one is a healthy rage imo. I think in a lot of ways many of us don't embrace the anger. I know for me I feel shame rather than anger. But truth is there should be anger that those meant to protect betrayed and harmed. That is worthy of anger and any shame is theirs not ours.

[invisible]

Wow! phenomenal writing. well done! I could feel the emotions! thanks for sharing them!