I dip my feet into hot lava, hoping the same course won’t be taken again. I know they say to be loved you have to love yourself, be who you want to be first; but that’s an impossiblity for one who ruminates on each nuance of society, life, expression, brain scarely stopping, even in scattered, tormented sleep.

I’m hoping someone will feel the way I feel, but not replicate who it is I am, cause I can’t be with someone as intense as me, I need a balance to calm the raging fires within. I could meditate, and act like life was zen, but I’d sound like a robot spouting words that I don’t believe. My poly says these things, speaks of ‘the law of attraction’, resist expectations, as if I’m supposed to self-soothe like an infant. He’s only intense when it comes to clamps, ropes, and fetishes, but try to have a talk about real life problems, and he clams up like a nervous speaker in front of a class who feels naked, exposed to the elements.

I’m probably making no sense, I’m all over the place, and that’s okay, because these words have festered long. I’m sick and tired of the ones that string me along, saying comforting things only to bed me again. I’m fucking sick of this disaster that I’ve created, yet I go back to the same places, finding people who see my words and wish to take advantage. I have baggage after all, I guess that’s what kids are called, a past life where a bubble wasn’t over head, where experiences created coping mechanisms that exacerbated pre-existing depression.

I can’t claim to be someone who knows how to deal, yet I need someone who appreciates the way I feel, maybe nurture a bit, not see me as a martyr, but as someone who thrives from love’s sweet nectar, consistency, unfleeting, someone that will stay, talk to me when feeling scared, not push me away, and I would do the same, if we could speak freely, knowing we both love the other and wish to keep going, treading life’s path together, hand-in-hand, heart-to-heart, weathering storms that others would run from at the sign of a drip, cause the way they handle feelings, scary and real, love, and compansionship, is by running far from the love they feel they don’t deserve, or can’t provide. It’s like the men in my life want to give me crumbs, then I will easily remember them, think of times far and distant where we were passionate, hope remaining only for the time we spent, then dying down like a crash after a high.

To the men who have helped me pass hurdles seen and unseen, I pushed you away, a tragic irony of what I feel and hope for, how I act, what I say; I can only explain what I understand, and I can’t for the life of me comprehend why I latch onto the leavers, the ones with something to prove, not used to kindness in all of its forms. I want to fix this mess that I’m currently in, don’t wanna text my friends with my lamentations, I wanna love with abandon, not be afraid to sink, I wish to know what I feel before lips part to speak, I need to feel absolution, a crucial remedy, to what I seek and who I find, cause they don’t deserve me.

Emily Cloward © 2018

this poem isn’t meant to have any real meter. I just needed to get the thoughts out.