Ode To Divorce

or (Please God, Help Me Keep This In Mind)
© 1993

Being with you
was like living at the bottom
of a deep, deep hole . . . . .
that I didn't even know I was in.
Now that I'm free and I see where I was,
I marvel that I had wanted so badly to stay there with you —
such misery is sin!

Now, when I come in and holler "I'm home!",
I no longer brace for your ho-humm indifference to chill me.
My pets dance around me. My projects surround me.
They thrill me! They need me! They feed me!
I'm feeling so free!

No longer am I in confusion nor pain
when you douse out my laughter,
or frown on discussions or jokes that I tell.
No longer down-trodden that you, my own partner,
devalued my love, and my work, and my life.
GO TO HELL!

No longer entrapped by your limited concepts,
I live my life just as I please —
for me, a gazelle in the wind.
I drive down the highway for miles, then realize
I'm no longer trying to please you, to fix you, to patch things.
There's nothing to mend!

I spend all my time now enjoying existence
and reveling in mine. I'm alive!
Can't figure out what I had clung to.
I sleep now less fitfully. I greet life more cheerfully . . . . .
for now I don't care if you kiss me, or miss me, or not.
HA!

Amazing! I've new friends who like what you hated about me.
Our psyches weren't matched! I'm feeling more loved . . . . .
So thinking it through, though I sobbed when you left,
it's worked out quite nicely for me —
my support reaches down from Above.

It frightens me, though,
how the Song of the Sirens confuses.
Romance sucks us in. One kiss and we're blinded.
But . . . . . the loneliness I had endured as your spouse
was by far, worse than being alone is.
(Please, God, help me keep this in mind!)

Written 3 months after my divorce. Every word of this one is drawn from personal experience.