"retrained" poems - Hello Poetry

She told me to "Imagine a safe place", a quiet place, somewhere to go when the fog is at my feet. But everywhere I went was crowded with doubt and a lingering loitering presence on my shoulder, come out from the fog to hurl accusations and taunt. I can only assume it's a he on my shoulder, an enigma, my father's doppelganger come to dredge my mind of all the **** he dished out when I was a child, and feed it back to me again. I tell her I'll need more tools and stronger ideas. So she gives me a seat at the head of the table where my ****** committee meets, and a gavel to establish order or bash in their brains. She arms my dreams with weapons and courage, gives me REM when I'm wide awake. We fashion a furnace of love, hot enough to vaporize the cold darkness pouring into my gut, customized with levers and pulleys to push and to pull in the fight. We tally Alpha and Beta waves, trained and retrained, hard coded messages sanded smooth by repetition. *Through it all I give too, and what I give is all I can give, it is the warmth of what enslaves me, and the thought of letting it go…. Well.... lets not go there right now.* In the long run I'm not sure that any of it will be enough, I am weakened by the war. But occasionally there are shiny spots that simmer, You see, I may have found that place, the place she first told me to find way back at the beginning, the place to feel safe, although it isn't really a place per se. If it were true I could finally ascend to where no fog can go. Where my father's voice cannot be heard, nor the ghosts I grew up with. A place of love and honesty, where my furnace would sit idle in awe. There is a picture of us on our bedroom wall. It is the perfect depiction of all that is safe for me. I look at your smile and I see peace. Nothing can penetrate your radiance, you are everything I've never had, double layered and impenetrable by all of it. By all of the **** I am learning to go there when the fog is at my feet, and the ghosts are in my ear. When the accusations come I can escape there with you, and together we can drown them out if only for a little while.

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Apr 5, 2019

Apr 5, 2019 at 1:39 PM UTC

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A Safe Place

She told me to "Imagine a safe place", a quiet place, somewhere to go when the fog is at my feet. But everywhere I went was crowded with doubt and a lingering loitering presence on my shoulder, come out from the fog to hurl accusations and taunt. I can only assume it's a he on my shoulder, an enigma, my father's doppelganger come to dredge my mind of all the **** he dished out when I was a child, and feed it back to me again. I tell her I'll need more tools and stronger ideas. So she gives me a seat at the head of the table where my ****** committee meets, and a gavel to establish order or bash in their brains. She arms my dreams with weapons and courage, gives me REM when I'm wide awake. We fashion a furnace of love, hot enough to vaporize the cold darkness pouring into my gut, customized with levers and pulleys to push and to pull in the fight. We tally Alpha and Beta waves, trained and retrained, hard coded messages sanded smooth by repetition. *Through it all I give too, and what I give is all I can give, it is the warmth of what enslaves me, and the thought of letting it go…. Well.... lets not go there right now.* In the long run I'm not sure that any of it will be enough, I am weakened by the war. But occasionally there are shiny spots that simmer, You see, I may have found that place, the place she first told me to find way back at the beginning, the place to feel safe, although it isn't really a place per se. If it were true I could finally ascend to where no fog can go. Where my father's voice cannot be heard, nor the ghosts I grew up with. A place of love and honesty, where my furnace would sit idle in awe. There is a picture of us on our bedroom wall. It is the perfect depiction of all that is safe for me. I look at your smile and I see peace. Nothing can penetrate your radiance, you are everything I've never had, double layered and impenetrable by all of it. By all of the **** I am learning to go there when the fog is at my feet, and the ghosts are in my ear. When the accusations come I can escape there with you, and together we can drown them out if only for a little while.