Scream
It was six a.m. and that was when I was screaming, it was my advent to this world. Nothing out of the ordinary just another birth. My mother was eighteen years old, an exceptionally beautiful young woman married to a man that was equally as good-looking, that she chose because the idea of having ugly children was unbearable to her. This vanity is what brought torment to her life, her “sperm donor” as she called him was a profoundly disturbed man who lashed out the rage that was deep in his heart on the only woman he claimed to have loved.
My complete understanding of my mother and what she had to endure came after she forced me to read the journal she had been writing soon after they got married. She was reborn after the death of my father and that was when I was told I had to read her pain. Because as happy as she was at the horrific way in which my father passed, she could never be free of the physical and psychological scars he left her with.
The words were carefully chosen, perhaps as a witness to her death, because she was sure that he would kill her one day and she wanted it to be known that “he was the wrongdoer.” My memories of her abuse start at a young age and the words were painted on the pages to reveal a cogent and vivid pictorial that was hard to ignore. And the way in which these words were convoked peeled of scabs that I thought had healed.
Like all unions, it started out blissfully happy, and the fact that he was handsome was repeated endlessly. She was a child bride and her naïveté was exploited by a young man who was much older than his years. This she later attributed to the household in which he was brought up. There was dysfunction from his augurous inception, and deceit and fear made him grow up much too soon. “He could make you believe anything no matter who he was talking to and when you looked the way he did people would become willing prey of whatever web he was trying to snare them in.”
She was from a small town and she saw him as a way out, witnessing her mother toil ceaselessly gave her a resolve not to be like her. “I thanked my mother for one thing when I left to get married and that was for making me beautiful, besides that she did nothing but introduce one drunk after another in my life.”
He was upper middle class and when they eloped to escape the sneering of his family he told her that she will have to be everything for him, that scared and elated her.
My birth came nine months later and with it the usual stresses that a child brings to a young family. “My love for you was something he could not stand,” a statement that has me riddled with guilt to this day, for what she had to endure and the demons he was trying to keep at bay. My recollection of him is spectral, didn’t quite knew if he was present or if it was a way in which I was dealing with the arbitrary and despotic rule of his ménage.
“The first time he hit me shocked me to the very core of my soul. I despised my mother for being treated the way she was and as the heat from the slap was radiating over my face all I did was cry, not for me, but for my mother.” Her first entry of the abuse was a week after my fourth birthday. By that time she had a college degree and she could have walked out and never looked back.
“I stayed because I don’t know; I don’t know why I stayed.” But as the venom of her hatred grew more potent she would say that “I stayed because I knew how much it destroyed him to hit me and he was less of himself every time he did it, and I could withstand any blow as long as I was witnessing and being the bane of his utter dissolution.”
There was a scission between love and marriage for me that can never be sutured, and as much as I want to understand what went on between my parents, their union will only perplex what I have been able to work out. She went on with her education and got a degree in psychology. “I want to understand everything about him.” She was snared in his web.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Fate
You have been cruel to me, is my suffering your glee,
for what I’ve done you were much too cruel, though paid
in full you still endure. Don’t you have another to torment
and make repent, or is it me you must impel.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Assisted living
The influence of my mother is the only thing that I give credit for anything I am. From the time my father was killed, she has been the spring well from which my curiosity about everything has quenched its insatiable need, and my awe of her about the knowledge she has did not wane even after receiving my postgraduate degree. So when on a beautiful spring afternoon I received a call from a stranger using my mother’s phone saying that the owner of the phone is lost and doesn’t know where she is: well, that was a day in which everything I believed in slowly started eroding like a sandcastle.
The drive to pick her up was not long, but it seemed like I traveled back in time countless times by the time I got to her. I went through life edifying her until she was a mythical creature sent to give birth, teach, love, and protect me. Drifting in the merciless and unforgiving fog of Alzheimer’s is something that I would not wish on anyone, because I have died every time she forgot me and rose from the ashes like a phoenix when I saw the smile of recognition, knowing that I would return to the cinders much too soon.
Time, my persistent tormentor, the long-standing rival picked up its pace, and from diagnosis to complete dementia seemed like a blink of an eye. I have stopped everything for her, and taking care of her was something that required round-the-clock vigil. When it was suggested that I warehouse my mother in a home, the rage I displayed almost had me committed. The patience she exercised towards who I am now cannot be repaid by storing her like used luggage, just like she experienced joy at every accomplishment; I want to shed tears for every lost memory.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Hope
I despise your existence. In desperation, I reside and you
have chosen to infect me. In vain I’ve tried exorcising you
yet you persist. Credited by countless for their salvation
you have come entitled, but I see you for what you are; a
tormentor of the forlorn.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Rupture
Odd; that is the pairing that ended up being me and her if you looked at only the superficial traits of our coming together. Our estrangement was not by choice on either side and now I feel part of me has been severed by capricious lines on maps. What the human race has done to alienate each other is more pronounced when what you truly want more than life itself is out of your reach because of some demarcation.
It was after midnight when I first saw her, she was distant, preoccupied, and the fact that I was not acknowledged bruised my ego a little even though I later found out that she generally does not entertain anything with people like me; a fact she was ashamed and proud of. I was a captive audience and that was the only reason anything was initiated. I was the front desk clerk at a hotel and worked the midnight to eight in the morning shift while I was going to school. Because of the lonesome nature of the job I welcomed any and all lonely souls that wanted to ease the burden they were lugging. And when someone as gorgeous as she was showed up all I did was smile and thank the fates for guiding her my way.
She did not like smoking in her room so she would come down to the lobby wearing a cotton T-shirt and pajama pants. The simplicity of what she was wearing belied the torturous effect it was having on me. And the fact that she knew what it was doing to me was validated by this sardonic and sadistic look that said “don’t you wish” right before she went to sleep every night. There was nothing said the first week, she would smoke her cigarettes and read her book and go back up to her room without a single word.
Then one day the Gods saw the lamentable effect her act of cruelty was having on me and her lighter stopped working, and she hesitantly asked for matches without having an inkling that I would burn down every preconceived notion she had about a person like me.
The conversations started out with some trepidation on her part, gauging what it was she could divulge because she did not know how long she was going to be there. It is much easier confessing to a stranger, but if her stay was going to be extended she would have to be careful about what she was going to say. The walls where she guarded what she deemed important were crumbling and soon after she was holding my hand across the front desk, smiling.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Chasm
I could bear the distance, but the silence, the silence...
is the memory of me waning? Is that what is done to forget,
mar what we were with your silence? What are you dampening
the laughter, the tears, and screams with? Do you sleep
knowing I am nothing without you?
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Copula
A link between two things. I was sixteen when said linkage happened. It was the eve of my sixteenth birthday, by this time my father had died and my mother was truly happy for the first time in her life. She had settled for a large sum of money for the wrong full death suit against a company that had charred my father’s body unrecognizable.
“At least we won’t have to cremate him” were her words of grief when she found out how it had happened. My mother’s sexual preference had changed by now and the woman she was currently seeing had a sixteen-year-old daughter.
I don’t know if it was planned by my mother or not, part of me does wish that she had planned it. Asking her was not an option for it would have possibly ruined a recurring fantasy so I will choose to believe that she did plan it. Being surrounded by only women when I was starting to find my sexuality really gave me an advantage over other boys my age.
The way thought was freely expressed in our house was a blessing for the obsession I had with the vagina, one that I still harbor. Knowing what to do and doing it are two different things, especially when it comes to sex because I had underestimated the power my penis had over my brain.
I suffered from insomnia all of my life so I was reading The Count of Monte Christo, and it was past midnight when she slowly started to scratch the door to my bedroom. When I opened the door she had on shorts and a T-shirt, and my heart jump-started several times within a span of thirty seconds. I didn’t say anything, perhaps I did and don’t remember, but whatever the case, an entity baser and much dumber than my self had taken over.
Even though we were the same age she was light years ahead of me. That was when I realized that men are congenitally stupid when it comes to sex and will forfeit more than what is needed to get it. The fact that said entity (my penis) with incredible powers resided in me and is now au fait about its supremacy disturbed me greatly; which only exasperated my insomnia later on, and to this day.
She sat on the bed and motioned for me to be next to her, I was a walking erection by then. I knew what was about to happen but a lobotomized Neanderthal would have been more cognitive. I was truly frightened by the total dominion my appendage had and would have to do whatever was necessary to gain mastery over it. It is a work in progress.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Nescient
Thought I knew what was you; forgive my lack - more than
hair, eyes, lips, breasts, legs; Forgive my lack - more
then what they say you are; Forgive my lack - more than what
I do not know; Forgive my lack.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Felo-de-se
Years... Months... Weeks... Days... Hours... Minutes...
Seconds... what is it that I am supposed to count? You are
no longer here and have taken what I am with you. I shall
give rise to a new me, and you will have to die once again
for I can not live if you are anywhere in me. I love you.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Homo sapiens
You wretched excuse for what you claim to be, wise man you
have labeled your self - Homo sapiens!!!, Homo sapiens!!! - I
see no wisdom in you. Your empathy is contrived, a cloak
of your true nature. Inconsequential, self-serving cretins.
You accidental mutation, only your wisdom could make you
extinct.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
Tableau Vivant
I have seen you; bare, without the artifice of your pageant,
and love you as you are.
©2010
mmguta@gmail.com
