He Killed Me First Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

Like me, most women hold their hearts in hand.
We push aside darkness to find the light,
remembering days when our cloudless eyes
rushed across the sky and its azure height.

With handfuls of dreams and surrendered stars,
we love with excess and infinite grace.
Then, wounded and scarred by iniquity,
we hide in the mask that covers our face.

I met him when I was just twenty-three,
unraveled in cycles of depression,
while dealing with my father’s suicide
and the quicksilver weight of oppression.

My heart was galvanized by shards of ice.
The sunlight dissolved and fell from the sky.
I packed the best of me and left the rest,
indiscernible and destined to die.

When he burned into my life like a star,
he became a bridge of impulsive wings.
I crossed his heart, as he flew into mine,
as a shadow that spills its offerings.

When I ran to him, I was running from me,
from the garden that was filled with my needs
and the monuments of pain and regret
that life had erected among the weeds.

I burrowed my heart in his soaring embrace
and penciled the past in lines of his smile
and buried the ghost of the girl in me
that had been aching for such a long while.

He let me believe in whirlwinds of lies,
in the dervish that danced on his lips,
in orchards of perfume and dainty silks,
and webs that he spun from his fingertips.

But nothing remains hidden forever.
The abstract becomes concrete in the end,
and silks burn in the fire of Dante’s pyre
and whirlwinds fade with the leave of the wind.

I don’t remember how it all started.
It crept through the window by slow degrees:
a furtive glance here and a harsh word there
or a judgement that was meant as a tease.

It culminated on the brink of madness.
At four in the morning, he crossed the line.
I could smell the alcohol on his breath,
and it turned my stomach into rapine.

He had his hands all over my body.
I kept pleading for him to let me sleep;
but he crawled like spiders all over me,
making me feel so disgusted and cheap.

“Get your damned hands off me! ” I screamed at him
and pushed against him to push him away.
He balled up his fist and punched me at once,
and stars exploded at breaking of day.

He busted the blood vessels in my eye,
and the bruise was like ink under skin.
It bled like violets soaked in the rain,
pressed between layers to shrivel within.

He wanted to hold me, love, console me,
said that it would never happen again;
but I pulled apart and undreamed the dreams,
tucking them neatly in the back of my brain.

I was so broken and shattered inside.
My self-confidence had gone on retreat.
I was a shadow, unloved, unwanted,
a leftover remnant of vile defeat.

He found me in a moment of weakness,
when the mirror was broken to pieces;
and I felt lucky to be loved at all
with my wings folded in at the creases.

You see … life for me was never easy.
The portents lived in my blood and my bones;
and when everything is made of glass,
it’s easy to break it by hurling stones.

For three years, I lived outside of myself.
The numbness stripped my solicitude;
and I was a half-me, a no-me: dead,
a specter that haunted my solitude.

And I cannot count the numberless ways
that he reduced my being to ashes
and pummeled my world with heartache and pain
between the boomerang and backlashes.

It was a late night in February.
The leafless branches pointed to the moon,
and I asked him to leave so I could sleep
as the morning would be arriving soon.

He diddled and prattled, refused to leave.
I just couldn’t take it anymore.
“You have to go; I need to sleep, ” I said,
as I stood there holding open the door.

He stood up and pushed me against the wall.
With his fist back and rising in the air,
he screamed at me, “Do you love me or not? ”
I knew he would hit me but did not care.

It was the final nail in my coffin.
He had already killed me deep inside;
and I gathered the strength to tell him, “No! ”
feeling at once that I should have complied.

Something in my eyes must have destroyed him.
He could not control me, and I was free.
“That’s it, ” he said; and then he turned to leave.
I’d broken the chains that wrapped around me.

The next day he was apologetic,
and I cried as I listened to him speak.
I wasn’t mad at him; I was mad at me
for being so stupid, helpless, and weak.

The memories rolled in like a fog bank:
the cruelty, the jealousy, and all;
the cold steel blade through the back of the door
that I had slammed shut to escape its fall;

his stalking and staring through my window;
the time he tried to run my car off the road;
the cursing and drinking; the kicked-in doors;
the threats that sent me into overload;

the moments when I held my breath in fear;
the phone calls in the middle of the night;
the way he’d talk with his besotted slur;
how I was always wrong, and he was right.

I swore it would never happen to me
having watched it happen to my mother.
I was wrong. I couldn’t have been more wrong!
We were mirror images of each other.

Both of us were broken and never healed
like the weakened spine of a worn out book,
and the years of estrangement built a wall
within which we found our own special nook.

There was just enough good to offset bad
to make me forgive him and make me stay,
to wrap my arms around the boy in him
whose father was absent and walked away.

The dust in his life was much like my own;
and in looking back, I could clearly see:
as my mother and father could not love,
I was living a life not loving me.

I did not think I deserved any better.
I lived between lines unable to see
that nothing had to be the way it was
and that I could write my own destiny.

It was over; we went separate ways.
All of the leaves fell from our book of hours.
The bridge was burned under an ashen moon
whose filaments fell among the flowers.

I had tilted my head to view the sky,
savoring the scent of the rain-washed pines,
when the telephone broke my reverie
and the unexpected news crossed the lines.

He had gone out that morning for a swim
in rhythmic waters of the Sông Sài Gòn,
and he glided into a memory
whose ghost I shall always reflect upon.

The river mistress whispered in his ear,
her fingers floating through his silken hair;
and she kissed him until his lips turned blue.
The life in his eyes was no longer there.

He rippled along her passionate waves
and lay his head upon her gentle breast.
She carried him into the afterlife,
unfolding his wings where he came to rest.

They found his body with the morning rise
where the river emptied into the sea
like a cradle against the river bank
rocking back and forth ever so gently.

Her firstborn belongs to the world of night,
slumbering deep in the palm of the earth;
and she peels back the layers of sadness
wandering far from the land of her birth.

I looked at the photographs and letters,
the artwork and the table that he made;
and I ached for the life that had ended,
for all the potential that he let fade.

He never believed he was good enough.
He was left behind as a soldier’s son,
as I was abandoned by suicide.
We were both casualties of the gun.

I cannot hate him; for, he was broken.
I guess he did the best with what he had.
As I think back on all the could-have-beens,
I can’t help but to feel a little sad.

He killed me first, but only in spirit.
I rose like a phoenix from the ashes
while he drifted into the blue abyss
as the Sông Sài Gòn covered his lashes.