The raw emotions of a woman by Suzanne Steinberg

Imaginary relationship
    How do you believe in
a make believe relationship, those squishy inside moments that only
memories re-live as telepathic intimacy? How do you rectify the
silence of too many years passed when you justified a generic
symbol as love? How do you accept the inhibited smile of walking
barefoot in a water fountain screaming out to the clouds of
childhood that evaporate years ago, but so close it almost drips
down the glass as liquid? How do you see yourself as any different
then you are, the monsters that crawls around ideas, the inner life
that you throw away for a foot in the door? How do you love that,
the shadows you predicted at birth and painted on the walls with
fingers tips, singing lullabies to dolls? How do you find the inner
strength to stand in the past of wasted opportunities without any
eyes, and only the nothingness of it happening, only the reasons
and reactions and the faceless words that follow you around telling
you their position on the argument? Those ceaseless raw emotional
words of someone else that got crammed in your ear one day, so far
down that in silence they have their very on stage, and in winter
around the dead trees covered with dirt, they are the only warmth.
The two sided face of love, the belief in someone’s paper thin
promises, the belief in a nightmare as you hold yourself awake
thinking eventually it will change, eventually the tap dance of
love on a vacant street will be special, it will be what you
thought it was, it will be what it is supposed to be, but in the
imagination everything is what it is supposed to be.
    +++
    Pressure
    Feet being pushed into shoes, smiles being sown onto faces,
love being disguised as meaning again, telling you who to be, who
has the rights to your affection, controlling you softly through
the cracked voice of a mother who is nowhere to be found, through
the soft memories of a father who you constantly dream about, and
you sow yourself shut to sit alone in a room full of strangers
pretending to be a doll, pretending to be the person that is
soul-less, mimicking TV commercial statements, paradises on
computer screens, songs that can’t leave your head, people’s
footprints that you follow up the walls like wall paper. You close
your eyes holding yourself into this mold of woman, this supposed
to be doll face of sexual desire that comes so close to real even
her hair grows, this plastic perception of a helmet that ever so
neatly looks like a face, a voice with a reaction and a subtle
comment about life, a could be half is, who smiles because she has
nothing to says. And the stuffing creeps out more and more in the
birthday massacre.
    +++
    Chinese Takeout
    Who am I supposed to be at every age, or the
minute before I was born, was I supposed to be someone then,
someone who had an agenda walking through life with a purpose that
was more important than the pitfalls and dead ends that society
seems to be known for, the mistakes someone else made that you hear
about over dinner in a foreign restaurant where half of the people
are from another country you can’t pronounce? Is there supposed to
be a pause of interest in-between the millions and ones stranger’s
faces I have begun to know by heart who all carry the same
conversations with the same tones just swooping out the nouns and
verbs? The broken bubble that seems to drift off into another
dimension where people question their own voice, did I mean to say
that, they ask walls, do I really sound like that, is that me
again, the repetitive question, is that me? The strangeness of
knowing yourself through the eyes of too many people whose tongue
is stuck on the half dissolved aspartate that replaces sugar. Do
you know me, we ask one another as we subtly change, cocoon again,
reverse, remorse, find the guilt behind a book and a locket that
was stuffed there? Is there a direction as we bubble back to the
easy going life style of compliance and who is who in our power
hungry directional