Shannon Benjamin 2022
The theatre behind my eyelids
Opens at eleven every night
Like clockwork,
The moment I hit alarm
Bright and bold
The marquee, the orchestra
The fanfare of everything
That is nothing.
As if it does not notice
These seats are empty.
This story’s been told
Everyone knows he dies in the end.
Shannon Benjamin 2022
I like to think they shared a look
A note and a half in the song
That they both knew the next words
And forgot about what would go wrong
The air in the room became thick
With the dust of the time that had passed
For a verse it seemed as if
Forever could have lasted.
Another’s hand was on his arm,
Another’s arm around her waist
But their eyes were on each other
In another time, another place
Age could tell the tale
Of what could have, should have been
But youth would lie forever
In the mystery of when
The silence in the years between,
His pride and pain had swelled it-
But he nightly raised his glass to her
And cursed the fist that held it.
I wrote this tonight. I haven’t written in a while, but this worked its way out and I wanted to share. This one is for my Mom.
DON’T YOU WORRY ‘BOUT MY MAMA
Heaven knows, she’s not an angel.
She’s danced with the devil many a Saturday,
Skipped church many a Sunday,
Worked through his hangover come Monday.
Heaven knows, she’s not an angel.
She’s lied through her teeth to make ends meet,
Smiling through her tears,
Coming back for forgiveness later.
Heaven knows, she’s not an angel.
She’s never down without swinging
Or hurling the last word,
Seen and not heard is not for her.
Heaven knows she’s not an angel.
She’s bitten back and sprinkled salt,
She’s stolen hearts and lighters.
She might still have the pen from the bank.
Heaven knows she’s not an angel.
She’ll have Reese cups for breakfast,
Fuel up with a Pepsi, chugging on the
Marlboro Express to Ambitionville – ETA TBA
Heaven knows she’s not an angel.
Her shorts still show
She’s still got it.
Cut off like the crop top up top.
Heaven knows she’s not an angel.
She sings off key when she thinks you can hear
(But she sings it with conviction when you can’t)
She says what she means – fight her.
Heaven knows she’s not an angel.
She puts the pedal to the metal.
She’s served dinner by candlelight after the bill was due.
She’s pushed when the door says pull.
She’s passed around suckers before dinner.
She’s let the kids cuss, let the dog on the couch.
She’s changed lanes without blinking,
Said things without thinking,
Like love you, bye and wear clean underwear
And behave and be good and be better
Than she, who was never
Close enough to perfect,
Though she’d really like to be.
Thanks for letting me share. Have a good rest of your evening and stay safe. ❤
xoxo
Hello, friends. It’s been a while, and I’ve not had much to say as I’ve been eyeballs-deep in work and school. I’m not sure how it’s all happened, it’s been a bit of a blur, but at least for the next few days, I have nothing going on except me, and my thoughts.
Today, a song came out. I haven’t written a song in years, but this one came to me like an old music box in the attic playing a song I thought I’d forgotten.
Of course, it was for her. Because she’s always on my mind. She’s always in the back of my head pushing me forward, reminding me to keep breathing and to keep looking up.
Barbara’s Song
I just wanted you to know
Even though you had to go
I’ll be waiting right here
Patiently
If you ever come around
If you find a way back down
I’ll be waiting right here
Patiently
Because I know you’re out there
Somewhere
In a space that I can’t see
But I know I’ll find you
Someday
‘Cause I know you wait
For me
I’m gonna be here
If you ever come around
I’m gonna be here
If you ever find a way back down
And I’m gonna be here
Because it’s where you
Brought me home
And I’m gonna stay here
So you’re never really gone
And when I look across this place
I smile when I see your face
Shining over everything I know
So even if you’re far away
You always have a place to stay
If you ever find a way back Home
I’d love to put this to music, so if I have any musically-inclined friends that can help me write this into notes, I’d be very appreciative. Thanks for taking a moment with me to remember the beautiful people we’ve loved, learned from and lost.
-xoxo ❤
It has been a long few months, and I have not had the words to describe it, to fully summarize the exhausting mucking-through that has been the bulk of my writing hiatus. Writer’s block is an awful affliction and I am clawing my way out. Tonight I was feeling a bit bristly and I picked this out, each word a little razor in my brain. Ever stepped on a prickly fern? They burn, and itch, and they’re impossible to see when they’re lodged in the thick skin at the bottom of your foot and therefore impossible to remove. More than ever, I am seeing various aspects of my life and feeling very similarly toward those variables in my life that I do with those goddamn prickly ferns.
So I wrote this out of frustration and was so relieved that something that was not complete and/or literal shit came out of me that I wanted to share it with someone.
Thanks for sticking around, and please tell your friends. Sometimes I write poems, and sometimes I try hard and write poems that might in some way suck a little less than others. I’ll let you be the judge and I’ll appreciate any feedback. Thank you.
Thorn bird
I will sing the song of swans for you
To prove
I possess a worth
To be proven.
I’d die to live, and lived only to die
By appearances,
Expectations and the infinite looping
Of what I think you think of me.
Be seen and not heard, suppress
The song and dance
Only when the world sleeps.
I took too long to arrive,
Born in the fall and kept going.
Flitting, unwittingly,
Mostly just unwillingly.
From rooftop to ledge,
Cliffs of my own creating
Could wings keep this heavy heart aloft?
A lack of faith, most disturbing,
In the simplicity of the wind;
Invisible strength, yet seen and so felt –
These things, in myself –
Mere melody without audience.
Every thorny poem
Until the words cut deep enough
to feel.
My song will be worth
Those words.
-xoxo
Tonight has me feeling sentimental. Not the good kind, where I remember all the good times, the crazy friends, the shenanigans I fell into and scraped myself out from. The kind that makes this living room look dark, makes my ears perk up with the faint echoes of a sad song, makes me feel like I need a beer or seven to make this go away. But then again, that’s something my father would say.
I always thought, like a child, that when I was taken from my mother, I was someone’s victory. Because she always treated me like a loss. She valued me when she had me because I wasn’t hers to keep. He made it very clear that I was his, that he was the one steadfast thing in my life – imagine that, a drunk being steady!
He has always been a terrific liar. A narcissistic demi-god in my life, controlling every aspect of my emotions with the ease of a puppet master. The terrible Zeus wreaking havoc on Greece to meet his amusements and vengeance. Tonight, I am angry. Tonight, I am defeated but not knocked down. Tonight I’m striking back, in the only way I’ve ever known how. With words he’ll never read, feelings he’ll never validate, and a rage that only he would understand because the dark side of the soul I inherited is his legacy.
Untitled: a poem for my father
The child you never wanted,
The woman you couldn’t get back.
The screams you wouldn’t swallow,
The heart and soul you lack.
The lullabies you never sang,
The secrets you couldn’t keep,
The habits you’ll never change,
The faith – you’d never leap.
The embrace you never gave,
The steps you never took,
The words you never said,
The pages you tore from the book.
The past you can’t deny,
The future you can’t face
The names you claim to forget,
The things you can’t outrace.
The time you never spent,
The rage you never held,
The chances that you lost,
The remorse you never felt.
The river you sold us down
The dollars in your eyes,
The loneliness you’ll feel
When you know we’ve realized.
There’s more in there. But this is a start.
-xoxo
I have the words in there somewhere, those beautiful utterances that are strung together so delicately that only the prettiest, most flowery words are produced. I just can’t seem to pick them out without breaking them down into ugly pieces of “love, heart, key, soul, happiness…” etc etc etc. Those have to be my most overused words, and as much as it kills me to rely on those old things, I feel like the other ones, the pretty, sensitive, honest words are stuck in there somewhere.
I want to be willowy and sinewy and lit up by the bright sun, but I find myself fat and dumpy hiding in the dark of my cliches and rhymes. Where are those words?! I am the poet, and they are mine! Why can’t I ever seem to catch up to them, no matter how long in the night I stay awake keeping chase?
I wanted to write a poem about the meta universe that two people in love find themselves in. I wanted to write about the very real, yet intangent, world that two lovers create and inhabit in and around each other. I’ve started something and I like some of these words, but there’s something better in there, I know there is. I was reading Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” and love love loved the part “On Love” where he discusses belonging with, but not to. On how to be separate, yet together. How to be different, yet one. After reading it, I asked myself how I could apply that to my own relationship. How I think of my Fair Ginger Lover as mine, and me as his, yet know full well we each have our own goals and dreams, our own Before and our own versions of what could exist should we ever encounter an After. When two hearts become one, how does that work? It’s something I’m meditating on right now.
But here’s the start. Because while I’m not finished, I’m not ashamed of the draft.
Manifest Destiny
I have always envied those
Whom dance in the space between souls
The purgatory of circumstance, caught
In the closeness of two people.
We call it love,
to be in suspended orbit, to adore
to touch ever so slightly yet
never let go
To sway in and out of each
Existence, becoming familiar with
the delicious foreignness of another’s mind,
as waves chase the moon,
as the moon tugs the tide.
To have but never to keep.
To belong with, but never to.
Revel at existing in
this personal universe within
the confines of contact
as close as our skin to our bones.
Within and without, we mingle
taking pieces as we trespass,
staking claim on something that
could never be property
calling the whole affair
manifest destiny.
Thank you for reading. xoxo
I wrote a new piece tonight that evolved from a conversation to a meditation to a freewrite to a bullet list and finally into what it looks like for now as I present it to you.
I’ve had a lot on my mind and my heart has been unsettled lately. Recent uprooting of old buried things concerning family skeletons have created a tension in my slice of the Universe and as a result, my usual management of my mental illness has been impaired. In short, I’ve been a cracking egg for a while.
And I hate eggs. The more I think about eggs, the more I hate them. I hate the way they taste, the thick, slurpy fatty texture of gooey sludge sliding down my throat like all the times my father laughs about our childhood like there was anything we were ever allowed to laugh about.
Normally, I would be more held back and I wouldn’t share so outwardly the fact that I have some pretty deep-rooted issues regarding my father. I know there are people who could “blow my cover” so to speak, but I think that after this long, and after this much therapy, I am allowed to finally say it out loud.
He will still believe he is right, and I am wrong. Because he is big, and I am small; he is smart, I am dumb; he is God, I am Unworthy. Lucky. Ungrateful. In the way. I won’t keep going, I could be here all night.
The poem.
Cruel and Unusual
A poem for my father
I want to know why you text me.
Because you do it out of the blue,
And I feel in that moment almost normal,
Like we could be sipping coffee a world away
In the dining room. With that clock, you remember?
Where do you get the nerve?
I want to know how you sleep at night
while I still have nightmares set in that barn.
I want to know how you’ve turned down
The volume of that scream,
The impact of anger against innocence.
I want to know how you get to walk away
like it never happened, how you get to
drop
eight years of my life into a bucket labeled History
like so much garbage.
How you get to burn the evidence.
I want to know how you smile at my daughters
like you never cursed their mother’s existence.
I want to know how you played us like pawns
in your hateful game of Custody.
What did you hope to build
from our demolition?
I want to know how you hid everything,
how you brainwashed them all.
How you smiled and shut the door
And opened a floodgate
Of accusation and education:
Reality redefined into ridiculous.
I want to know how you changed all the rules.
I want to know why you never answered,
will never answer,
for your actions.
I want to know why I held out my hand for as long as I did,
why you never looked down to take it.
Why you kept me;
why you let me go.
I want to know why you wake up,
each day a new day
while I find another yesterday
for every tomorrow I am given.
I want to know where you bought
your immunity,
to whom you sold your soul.
I want to know how you still manage
to guilt me into a Father’s Day card each year,
how you make me miss a man you never were.
I want to know how
you think you still deserve
a daughter,
why I still think
I deserve you
at all.
I’m working on a new poem but I’m not quite sure where I stand on it. It’s a bit of a battle between my many selves. Thanks for reading.
Of course I am self-conscious.
I have self-respect. I just don’t.
I own an awareness, a conscience.
I am quite aware of the disappointment.
Do not think I cannot feel your cringe.
I am more than I thought I would be
and more than you thought I would be
Yet not, no, never enough
To be what we thought I should be.
I wear myself all over my skin
And under it, inside the belly
That held sacred things,
Sometimes secret,
and each a stark reminder
of our differences.
Raised with great expectations
Such a deep well of words
And the tallest of dreams
For the smallest of shoulders
A wildflower with seeds to sow
A Thursday’s child,
With so far to go.
You are not in my face,
Nor my heart, nor my blood
But in my soul, where you stain
And my ear, with every single
Pavlovian response I cannot deny.
Be seen, and not heard, and not
Caught in a laugh or a whisper
Or a second plate or a little dance
For no reason.
Because everything has a reason
And a place and a rule and a law.
‘Be wild’ they tell me,
Dressed in my best with the biggest holes.
I made them myself while I earned
Street cred, with my careful aim
And my scissors and safety pins.
Be as you as you can be
until you don’t remember who you were.
I will pose in every picture,
take in every scene
and wear them on my sleeve
Until I find a face I fit in,
that feels like mine.
The Saturday Evening Poet 