Dangerous Women-A Book Of Poems

DANGEROUS WOMEN

  By

  Gabrielle Garbin

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Dangerous Women

  Copyright © 2013 by Gabrielle Garbin

  Cover Design

  Copyright © 2013 by Gabrielle Garbin

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FRIENDLY FIRE

  HARD CANDY

  BAD MATH

  GRETEL

  QUESTIONS

  DANGEROUS WOMEN

  YOU BURIED ME

  HARRIDANS

  SHARP OBJECTS

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  FRIENDLY FIRE

  She loved me hard when she was little,

  so hard my ribs made dry-knuckle cracks with every hug.

  Her little arms wound round my neck,

  snuggled close, she built a future of

  “I’m always going to spend Christmas with you and dad.”

  She broke rules she didn’t know existed,

  years away from the ticking clock, the time limit on her innocence.

  She is a casualty now in a war she never made and doesn’t understand.

  Jealousy has burned down her house with her childhood still inside,

  erected monuments to its pain, hell-bent on killing any love it doesn’t own.

  She is older now, a tired little soldier, ducking and dodging, but

  forced to fire every so often at someone she loves.

  HARD CANDY

  Peace offerings come around Christmas time.

  Potent sweets wrapped and offered as “amends”

  pink promises topped with sugary smiles;

  an annual reprieve from a war I never know I am fighting.

  I bite. Chew. Hope. And wait…

  The New Year comes…the ball drops…and along with it, the other shoe.

  Peace is dull for the angry, the discontented.

  A random encounter sets every cell phone buzzing,

  “You will never believe…and then she said…and oh, my god!”

  Rejection follows, guilty as charged, condemned without proof.

  Another year, my eyes injected with fat tears,

  all hope of finding “the normal” in this place banished.

  Christmas will come again…filled with more sugary promises,

  doses of hard candy love, spiked and bitter, a death row treat.

  Cyanide looks like sugar if you disguise it right.

  BAD MATH

  Mothers teach their child how to artfully reject

  “Daddy, the bad Daddy…the Daddy who neglects…”

  brainwashes, hypnotizes, banks on the child’s trust,

  sabotages, drains away any love that threatens mommy the most.

  Takes the child miles away in an effort to halt

  the child’s belief that maybe it isn’t all Daddy’s fault.

  Draws lines around the child and divides her from her father,

  confuses her with smiles, gives hugs and hate to the new stepmother.

  Manipulates and trains the child to choose sides

  to further ensure the new family divides

  until all that is left is the mother and her “chicks”

  among the remnants of a family too damaged to fix.

  She does what she does, in myth, on the child’s behalf.

  In dividing the child’s love, she divides her child in half.

  GRETEL

  A chance encounter and a hag is caught,

  pinned under the pretty woman’s skin.

  Its shiny, spit-flecked word-knife freed from my back,

  it shrieks and covers its eyes, hides from the glare of truth,

  scurries under a rock, digs out a cell phone, and hisses ruin.

  It destroys our Gretel’s love for us because it can,

  because she has given it her power.

  She is too young to pay the price for love made hard by others.

  With no idea how to have it all, she lets us go,

  blind to the hag hidden under fading beauty, a child’s trust

  in a familiar once-upon-a-time aunt.

  The hag whispers away Gretel’s weekend with us, hisses in her ear, chiding,

  “go home to your mommy, your friends…why would you spend time with them?”

  Offers the Kool-Aid, holds the cup, “C’mon sweet girl, drink it up.”

  It slithers into places it doesn’t belong, beguiling children

  who don’t understand divorced-women clichés, meddling ex-aunts,

  or bitter-mommy-right-fighter politics. “…why would you spend time with them?”

  And Gretel drinks, drinks away her respect for us, drinks in the gossip,

  sups up the manufactured offenses and other detritus, until the hag owns her.

  Our Gretel is caught in the gingerbread cottage, dazzled by sugared words,

  while the hag whips up more tasty fare to stuff in someone else’s child

  along with fat compliments and a buddy-buddy style.

  It feeds doubt to someone else’s daughter; a meal conjured from insecurity and jealousy,

  fed to a child who doesn’t know what the fight is about.

  Satisfied, the hag smiles and poses for a picture,

  taken with my camera, its own little Hansel a bridge between it and the weekend father,

  trash-talking and twisting the love of his brother’s child, as if it had the right,

  while its own little Hansel is safe, no whispers of doubt or meddling,

  protected as he is, by the very people his hag-mommy hurts.

  QUESTIONS

  Here is your phone, send another text.

  What mean thing would you like to say next?

  One word of advice: If you’re going to commit treason,

  it should be for your own, and not someone else’s reason.

  So quick to dismiss, throw me under the bus,

  and your father, too, if he won’t back “them” up.

  You have a choice but refuse to step back,

  willingly suit up and join the attack.

  It breaks my heart to see how easily you reject,

  how cold you have become, how much you disrespect.

  Poor little brainwashed string-puppet girl;

  they know so well how to control your world.

  You want to cut parents out of your life

  because your mother is jealous of your father’s wife?

  Go ahead, cut me out; don’t bother, don’t care

  about a little thing like the truth, or what is, and isn’t, fair.

  Ask yourself the questions, doesn’t it all seem strange?

  Why do these women’s feelings constantly change?

  Why would grown women pull you into the fray?

  Why do they drag you into the games that they play?

  As long as you love us, she’ll never be done,

  Use you to fire the bullets, and give her back the gun.

  She needs to reload so you can shoot another round.

  Do her dirty work for her, make your mother proud.

  The family wound is growing bigger.

  Women shoot your family down, get you to pull the trigger.

  Why would they do this? Jealousy warps their point of view.

  The real question is…why would you?

  DANGEROUS WOMEN

  Dangerous women don’t look dangerous.

  They come with bright, shiny faces,

  draw you close with a Judas kiss,

  dose you with distorted friendship, false affection.

  Every hug is an anatomy lesson,

  a careful search for the tender spot,

  to shove the knife in and wait. r />
  Only when the murder is clean,

  when you are sliced free

  from everyone you have ever loved,

  do they extract the blade.

  YOU BURIED ME

  You buried me again

  hoping I’d stay dead.

  Put the last nail in my coffin

  with every word you said.

  But it didn’t work out for you

  as well as it worked for me.

  It didn’t hurt that much,

  and I began to see…

  How buried I was,

  but buried by choice,

  walking on eggshells,

  no courage, no voice.

  False love kept me quiet.

  False love kept me down.

  But you don’t love me.

  You put me in the ground.

  Love is a burden, love like this

  with crazy women doing what they do best,

  beating up each other,

  thriving on chaos, no peace or rest.

  This may not work out for you,

  as well as it does for me.

  They were brutal, your lessons,

  but my heart is finally free.

  HARRIDANS

  My good life is agitating the divorcees,

  These harridan women who are never pleased,

  with their heads full of fiction they pass as truth,

  as they manipulate, excoriate, badmouth and abuse.

  Bitter women who left, but never seem to leave,

  with their phony smiles and the victimhood they weave

  tight against their old lives, to ruin an ex-husbands life,

  to alienate his children and scapegoat his new wife.

  Took away the children, moved them far away

  cut him out of their lives on any given day.

  Pre-emptive strikes, running from pillar to post

  terrified the child won’t love them the most.

  Not above slander, not above ruse,

  lives never rebuilt, no new life to lose.

  Twelve years of chaos, vicious women in every season.

  I could tell what I know, I could give them a reason.

  Not this year, not today, the explanation for why

  they undermine; but I could pull off the disguise

  expose their true nature, unravel the falsities they spin,

  and in doing so, let them make me into them.

  SHARP OBJECTS

  Your eyes are sharp objects, full of shiny little knives

  your mouth full of barbed wire, twisting and gutting lives.

  You’re cutting us off again, throwing us away

  based on a phone call you received today.

  Big surprise, nothing new, we’ve been here before;

  and still you never ask why they come knocking on your door.

  Snippety snip, and a cold little text from out of the blue,

  good girl, good tool, did what they wanted you to do.

  This is not love, this judging and taking of sides

  but a soul test of character, where real love resides.

  You wish to sever a bond over such silly stuff?

  May I recommend using your tongue? It is sharp enough.

  FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  You were yelling at your husband the first time I met you,

  The baby slung on one hip, your dark hair framing your pretty anger-distorted face,

  your voice like a foghorn, the envy of any fishwife, splintering the quiet.

  I thought my ears would bleed from the echoes

  that bounced off the four corners of the room when, eyes glittering,

  you turned and eviscerated him with a handful of words.

  Your round-shouldered husband giggled, pulled a cigarette

  from his brother’s coat pocket and stepped outside.

  I followed him, with a can for his butts, and said,

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  He drew down on the cigarette expanding the hot orange tip,

  exhaled and said, “I don’t.”

  THE END