Diary Of A Lost Girl, No.1: Late-Night Showers And Empty Musings Poem by Elizabeth Peterson

A web of water plays over my knee.
I stand, lather, scrub.
Soap clings to my naked body;
I scrub harder.
Am I clean now?
Am I worthy? Deserving?
Can I rise to meet his hopes,
His expectations,
Or will I fail this time too?
I rinse, watching bubbles dance down
My shiny skin.
My skin: as delicate and breakable as the arrogant son’s single stick;
As dark and cheap as a hooker’s fake tan;
As taut and elastic as the bands of insecurity that constrict my hands,
neck, wrists, and self.
…
My words form without connotation;
My hands grasp and mold things without significance;
My unseeing eyes follow shapes without meaning.
Though images trigger fragments of poetry,
Of love song, of life, of truth,
They lack rhythm and form and flow and
Space and Time shove all thought aside.
Life is meaningless in this void,
This lack of self.
How can I be worth anything,
Mean anything,
Deserve anything,
When I am nothing?
How are my successes or failures measured and recorded
When all value has been sucked away?
How is my body still intact
When heart, blood, breath, and soul are missing?
…
When all is scrubbed away,
What is left besides an empty shell and
Layers of insecurities
Filling the place where my self used to be?
…
How can I be wanted or loved or accepted for me
When nothing of myself is left?
Though the words “broken beyond repair”
Spring to mind, it is impossible to
Break something that isn’t there…
…
The water burns as it runs cold,
Opening all the sets of fear that
My brain had neatly sorted and shut away.
…
And so I wait for the nightmares to begin,
Letting careless words overtake me.
But, frustrated by their direction,
I try fruitlessly to put my pencil down…
I want to stop writing pointless, meaningless things…
…
..
.

And at last,
My pencil falls still,
My brain silenced by the relative quiet of sleep.


EMP
July 19,2009