do ya?

you tell me im cute

hold my hand

curl my curls around your finger

but do you SEE me?

you say im funny

laugh at my jokes

wrinkling your nose & the corners of your eyes

but do you HEAR me?

you tell me im smart

deeply pondering my musings

sharing your reactions to my lifes journey

but do you UNDERSTAND me?

you know my middle name

you know the story behind every tattoo and scar

you can trace my curves with your eyes closed

but do you KNOW me?

if you do

SEE me

HEAR

UNDERSTAND and KNOW me

why am i invisible

alone

cold

and frustrated

is it because

maybe

i dont let you

or me

KNOW

me?!

addendum

don’t hold my hand, i don’t want it to mean something

don’t kiss my lips, i don’t want it to mean something

don’t press your bare skin up against mine, i don’t want it to mean something

don’t tell me i’m beautiful

don’t tell me i’m smart

or witty

or charming

or full of insight

or moxy

i don’t want it to mean something

don’t come swooping into my life

consuming me

wrapping my wholeness in glitter and glitz

and warmth and optimism

and titillating promises of futures

i don’t want it to mean something

don’t insult me

don’t neglect me

don’t take me for granted

don’t stop seeing who i AM

don’t make me leave with less than i came in with

i don’t want it to mean something

10k

evicted and evacuated

panic my companion and leader

traversing the same road

blindfolded by the thickness

attempting escape of the round rubber room

i fall and fail

staying down hopes for dissipation

breathing

fearing

resting

centered

standing

walking

forward

role

well travelled
from verbose to morose
nothing found in empty arms
again
and still

life breathing
heart beating
earth spinning
unaffected and unrejected

walk about as i was born
comfortable and secure
longing only in weakness
knowing my appalling calling

between life’s tread and dead
i do not blink or sink
no surprise or sunrise
just more breathing and deceiving

fin

handing you the pill

keeping the murder weapon for myself

we fade into the reality

resisting no longer an option

separte

alone

apart

insignificant

futile

even in this experience

modified

casual words scarify the now dead dream with permanence

sharing sleep doesn’t mean you share dreams

neither does love

or love

have i lost myself again?

me contingent on you

you defining me

me nameless, tasteless, and out of touch

like a dream of naked high school hallways

i resume the traveless walk

or the journey to your destination

blinded to the forks, splits and reality

i look to my empty hand and trace the shallow lines

with my own fingers

mapping the life ive been missing

again

unsurprised

unrelenting

irony

born to die alone

ever surrounded by the untouchable

skin

 

 

nine

i knew this would come

stifled by the space

and darkness

familiar streets

the same old faces haunting the same old haunts

blocks i could circle with my eyes closed

the heaviness

the sadness

the cheese in the acme rat trap

i am not here

though my fingerprints scar the neighborhoods and predictable street signs

i never was here

she was me but i was not her

and here i am

unable to fill her shoes

and unwilling

smothered by the need to drive and “find something to do”

knowing the steps to its funeral march

i am paralyzed by my coordinates

suffocated regrets of never leaving and always returning

i am not her

yet it cleverly calls her name

and the emptiness in my heart

is programmed to respond

Jennifer Misiurewicz-“Daughter”

Have you ever wondered about the origin of words? We can research their evolution, but not the human element of choice in their inception. Imagine I hand you a fork as a child and teach you that it’s a “gun.” Something so simple would turn tales of family dinners into something unimaginable. And spectacular.

This makes me consider a word that, in its intention seems benign, I believe cannot be taught. Cannot be defined. Cannot mean in adulthood what it meant to us as children. “FAMILY.” This isn’t where I insert my recollections of creepy uncles and dark familial betrayal. I’m instead weighing my vocabulary against my sensibilities.

Your “mother.” In a dictionary we’re told it is a female parent, the woman who birthed us, or raised us. Your “father” is the male counterpart, sans birthing. Your “family” is the coupling of mother, father, their offspring and extended relatives. Sounds simple enough, but it isn’t.

Many times in my life, I’ve felt alien, neglected, misunderstood, abandoned and look upon with incredulous horror by those people. Granted, a majority of my Freudian damage is very First World and influenced by childhood perception, but to me those feelings and memories are real. They sometimes have weight, substance, texture, color, odors and temperature. Under oath, the defendants of my self-indulgence would enter my plea of insanity on my behalf.

My childhood trek and often dastardly adulthood have given cause to these questions and skewed redefinitions. I look back to kind hands of a friends mother when I suffered scrapes more heartfelt than knee-felt. A father of my boyfriend who ALWAYS laughed at my jokes, told me I was beautiful and had endless rolls of film on those days. The coworkers who appreciated my development and constantly reassured me that I was real, valid and worthwhile. The boyfriend’s mother who housed, fed & clothed me in the weeks before beauty school in exchange for pouring her single glass of wine at dinner.

My memory bank is full of far more recollections of my Mom and Dad. Events very often more significant. But in my lowest times, my personal victories, and most importantly, the transitional valleys, there were “others.” These “others” were the glue that kept me together when I felt shattered by “family.” These “others” taught me that I can take all the splintery shards bequeathed to me by “family”, and fashion a mirror that reflects the human being I am. I was. That is the obvious destiny.

In the past I may have lacked gratitude for my family. In the past I neglected to realize my misunderstandings that lead to me abandoning my family like aliens with incredulous horror. In the past, others from outside my family taught me gratitude for them by showing me that regardless of their intentions, my family molded a person who was witty, intelligent, creative, cultured, open minded and open hearted that’s well worth more than “A DAMN.” So as I prodigly return home, time and time again…”Home.” Home. Yes, home. That word has always been accurate.

4 Score and Recently “Updated”

Studies of our prehistoric ancestors have shown that art, music, religion, dance, and even language itself, was a way to pass down our history, our traditions, our memories. In my lifetime, I remember reel to reel home movies. Slide projectors. Audio recordings. VHS tapes and BetaMax. And 76 pound photo albums. I have learned to do my own shitty attempt at a polka. I have ran my thumbs and index fingers across the patches of quilts made by great great grandmothers. I have slipped into the dress my grandmother wore on her wedding day. I have sat for hours upon hours watching my grandmother patch clothing while she told me stories of her childhood. I have sang and hopped in afternoons full of double dutch. I have prayed to a blue-eyed Jesus, well, in a church that was built before my grandparents were born, gazing at placards of devotion in memorium of people who died from diseases that have since been eradicated. This has spanned less than four decades. A blip in the inhale exhale of man.

As I ironically sit at a laptop typing to invisible eyes, I miss nostalgia. In the day of blogs, facebook, twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, I wonder, who are we compiling these memories for? When scrapbooking came back en vogue, I scoffed at it visibly, ever jealous that I knew I lacked such focus and dedication and follow through. It was time sucking, overly involved and  a cosumerist industry I had no time or desire for. After all, I had to go to work to pay for my wifi so I could spend my work day telling complete strangers what I ate for lunch.

Even at 38 years old, I adore a good scar story. I spend dreamy hours in vintage shops. I prefer clothing worn previously by a friend or stranger. I secretly pine for the day I get my grandmother’s dishes “over my mom’s dead body.” But what do I do with all this information, experience, and memory? Do I sit my niece down and try to explain the discomfort of shoulder pads in the 80s? Do I show her how we used to entertain ourselves…*gasp* OUTSIDE with only rocks, bugs and each other? Do I teach her how to roll biscuits and make frosting from scratch while I teach her the Polish word for “butt”? I’d like to say I do, but more often that not, I log her onto my Facebook. Within an hour of seeing each other, she’ll unfailingly ask if I have any new kitty pictures or videos or to show her my friend’s kids’ pictures ONLINE.

Though I’m not a mother, as an inhabitant of Earth, aren’t I obligated to pass the past the way our ancestors did? Word, written or ideally, spoken. Songs from my grandmother reminiscent of Sweden, my childhood church hyms declaring the joy joy down in my heart, and double dutch marches giving nods to jeans that we couldn’t afford but everybody wanted. My haphazard version of the Polka. My 76 pound photobox.  My ability to make and color play clay from scratch. Are these things still valuable if their not POSTED? Are we LIVING the experiences we share with anonymous masses via social networking? When you finish a collection on Pinterest or Instagram or WordPress, will you print them out and tangibly share them with our little people? Or will we, our collections, memories and existence all fade into the virtual nothingness that calls us “friend” or even worse, “follower?”

Composing My Composition

To this day, I’ve never known what I’ve wanted to be when I grew up. Sure, I can drop some wonderful answer or answers that make me sound driven and focused, but those answers are just like my mind, dreamy. I have babysat children until they no longer needed supervision. At the movies, I was your ticket girl. Copy, collate, bind, laminate and things of these ilk saw me from Illinois to North Carolina. I’ve convinced you of how great you looked in over priced and under styled clothing. My day was filled with checking yourself and your mistress, dealer, gay lover or lonely soul into hotel rooms, no questions asked. Drink mixer, personal counselor, girl with the rack and bitch for hire blanketed my eyes for a few years from the giving end of the bar. I’ve help children stand straight, walk correctly, recover from injuries and colic as your friendly desk girl at your Chiropractor. None of these things, are who I am.

Before an age even the most egregious sweat shop would hire me, I have written. I have sang. I have crafted. I have loved clothing. I have gazed into distinctive windows of kitschy houses. I have strained my neck grasping for glimpses of the apex of sky scrapers. I have instinctively changed diapers, fed soft milky lips and patted soft spined backs. Is this who I am? My bank account would argue that, “No ma’am all evidence states to the contrary.” It kinda feels like me, left to my own inner thoughts, but does that matter?

Ever since I was a little girl I never understood why I felt directed to be something other than what I felt. I should want dolls, not Han Solos. My toys should reflect a future dictated by television reruns from a past that truly never existed. Likewise, so should my career and self-image. Wouldn’t it be great to be a teacher? Or a nurse? Or a softball player? Or thinner? Or have a bigger ass? Or the girl who makes boys fight for her affections? Or drunk? Or high? Or miserable to the point of being incapacitated for days? Wouldn’t it be grand? Think of the possibilities! And when you find yourself legally adulted, you’ll have no idea who you were, are, and will be. Instead, you’ll have a carpet bag of failures, diagnoses and vertigo. My name is Jennifer, and I am a…an uncertainty.

The funny thing is, if I look back, I can be resentful and angry and enraged that I was passed along from one person’s ideal to another. The momentum started before I realized my voice, opinion or self-knowledge had merit. Yet here I am, fine. Not “fine” in the teeth clenched, white knuckled grip of adult denial, fine like okay. I made it through all that topsy turvy undirected, yet pushed and pulled life. I’m not angry. I’m not sad. I have no regrets. I do have something all that made me aware of. I have a survival instinct that should instill fear in the black soul of my oppressors. Inside of me, there is a voice that will stay quiet as I bumble through life gathering lessons and scars and debt and vices, until it is time to go. And when that time arrives, I am a force of reckoning. There will be no discussion. I will not issue you a receipt. Exit stage left.

Rest, recovery time, reconstruction, reparations will follow, some times quickly, some times slow and laboriously. Then I stand. I resume my universal walk about. Looking back is only to recall the origin of my acute  inconvenient pains and use those memories positively, usually to make you laugh at my jokes or wallow in my poetry. With my constantly evolving and patched up soul, I glide through my days gazing into distinctive windows of kitschy houses, strain my neck grasping for glimpses of the apex of sky scrapers, I  instinctively change diapers, feed soft milky lips and pat soft spined backs. Then I write it all down, in some way shape or form. As only a person who has lived is capable of.

gag

amputated tongue
mouth stitched usless
words escape & mutiny
ineffective
injurious
time sucking syllables
scarred into mind, soul & ear
speech becoming screeching
mind & heart void of consideration
the meaning long lost
motives made moot
phonetic failure my only fortitude

neighbour

i see the flicker across your face
the smell oozes from your pores
more dead than alive
you gasp for air
heart nonetheless beating
beating for spite & out of habit
stale exhales cross dry unkissed lips
artificial hair color
makeshift soul
heartless sleeves hide your scars
journeys void of straight lines
heels hardened by hellish walks
you are me
i am you
unless i change

sacrament

itd be a lie to say i never lie
i lie to myself
i lie with men who lie to me
my heart upon a shelf

i yearn for the honesty
though it scares my soul to death
unsure id even handle it
and manage the management of breath

seems odd to brace off truth
seems odd to run from fact
but run i have and run i will
never looking back

true truth is self created
self truths the elusive dream
unfrequented often foreign
uncomfortably tearing seems

can i fault you for who you are
can i ever trust your word
lies from self & others
the only things ive heard

+1

tenuous tedious time tried & tired
i haven’t seen the mountain top
i’ve just heard it exists
slippery sliding stranded & sucked dry
crying out to the echoes & the ether
looking for a new path in my old grooved & worn road
eyes dry distracted divided & dumb
resistance is as futile as lies
heart educated by repetitive madness
crushed cracked crazy & checked out
no longer tethered by hopes stone
the little red balloon departs my heart
exhaustion of excuses explanations & eternity
i float in the linear streams of truth
sinking, all the while strapped to your back

adrift

my soul has memorized you in every way
with words not yet uttered lest written
each lash sigh touch tastebud inhale
and here we are
you me us
and the widening abyss
that’s whispering……….
forgotten