I Can Admit Now

There has been a phase in the last few years where I blocked out

The possibility that you ever loved me

To compute how you could do what you did to a man you ever loved

Seemed impossible

How could you be that selfish, that cruel, that unrelenting

I have never seen you flinch in six years

I could not comprehend how I could completely offer my being

Only to use my consciousness as fuel to disguise your self hatred

I see you in your life and I realize your flaws are what they are

Monstrous to me, compensated in a saccharine kindness to the remainder

As you wish

I have struggled so with believing that love could ever be real

For if all those moments of attempting intimacy with you

Could lead to your actions to defile and defame, how could I ever expect better

And yet now, I think I do

I see what your successors have done in response to me

I accept my inability to let go of wanting to prove to our daughter’s future self

The town’s people in some extent of what you did, of who you are

Of what I am not guilty like a flag of innocence

I need not validation in the story, in the writing, in the documentation

I need but shed these evidential purses, the papers, the photographs

The representations of what was as if that is all I will ever achieve

As some sad pinnacle

I am beyond that now built with sticky pained ink illustrated in a beauty

Only darkness knows the contrast to what a white bread life leaves to blandness

I am so much invigorated and growing now outside of such myopic petri dishes

I am embracing fear as a lover’s call, to bed with this city of ruins making connection

In the isolation the loneliness no longer bears my pursuit of vengeance

And like Monte Cristo I ascend past into the eyes of waging a war with God through the self

I forgive me for not knowing what to do, but now I know how to go to my people

As best I can block to block and breathe the deep breath