Down In Me

Much love from me

You know I love you
With your hand squeezed tight
Between my legs

They know I love them
With their skin, faces tight
Unwashed, unhurried
I skitter
down
anxiously

You know I love you
With your fists wound tight
‘Round my neck

Blood-suckered, angered
Hollow, following
unknown something ideals
Marxist, socialist
Take a shit-ist
We don’t care-ist
They know we love them

5 responses

  1. lissa comments:

    wow. powerful poem. your pieces have such a strong voice & tone in them. the last stanza in this one is my favorite part of this one.

  2. Jim Murdoch comments:

    I like the structure of this piece. I’m not sure I get it, and by that I mean, I can’t find a neat meaning to lay over the piece. My gut feeling is that it’s about domestic violence – certainly the first and third stanzas suggest that. I thought the ‘they’ in the second stanza were their children but I can’t really see them in the last stanza. That said, I think ‘Take a shit-ist’ and ‘We don’t care-ist’ are great lines although I would have hyphenated them. It reads well.

  3. An Unreliable Witness comments:

    It’s chilly in here.
    [In a good way, I should add.]

  4. Ani comments:

    Lissa: Which is funny because I feel I have the weakest voice fairly often. Thanks for letting me know I can come across differently.

    Jim: I think you got it quite well, considering I didn’t really know what I meant when it poured out. Reading it over, I think I *was* referring to domestic violence, of a sort: the kind that (without realising it or without meaning to) we inflict on each other regularly, in our closest relationships. I think. Or something like that.

    AUW: Chilly? Oh, no. Did the duvet fairies steal your duvet again?

  5. LilliPilli comments:

    I just like the way it sounds when you read it out-loud.

Leave a comment