"Co-Dependency"

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You know the story; Mom and Dad wage their own war, dropping emotional napalm on one another, bombing each other with cutting statements and shocking affairs, and then, in some rare moment of mental clarity, they kind of wonder a little bit about how all of this is affecting the children...

So here it is: "Co-Dependency"

 

"Co-Dependency"

For love of you, I have become like a bird on the wing,

flying far above pain, loss, or any other irritating thing.

For lack of you, I have become as a brute beast gone to ground

snapping, biting, breaking, all beautiful things anywhere around

me.

 

It's just flat flabbergasting, how, even if we did not like each other,

we would still find a way to love one another…

There are times, during the quiet moments of night,

when I think of you, and my need for you

seems to settle somewhere between a shriek and a moan,

a screech from the pain, and, from the pleasure, a groan.

Our presence, yours with mine, settles within our two minds,

as unto some personal, pleasing purple haze

and stayed that way, until those unhappy days

when our passions crossed, and we fought.

 

That was when we became like two angry unicorns,

totally engrossed in stabbing each other with malevolent horns

we go that way and

there’s only insipid dissipation of that once - pleasing purple haze

still, the fight comes on, seeming that it will forever just go on

and on, but

it’s only a wave from the storm of what we call “our love.”

When it’s over and gone, one of us just sits and stares at the other,

while we both really wonder how the hell we bear so well

the strain of these too - long days when we’re stuck at home,

right next to one another…

 

But don’t you find it simply mentally mystifying

how our eyes cry only lonely loveless tears

whenever we’re apart and haunted by fears

that we’ll never see one another anymore?

And that’s just so dumb, isn’t it?

Can’t we step back a moment and see how that makes absolutely

no sense?

We get - so tortured and tormented by one another’s absence

But so worn thin, unsettled within

whenever we’re afflicted with each other’s presence…

 

Now I don’t know what any other outside observer

would say that they see

But when I stand back and glance at it,

It looks like an incisive intimation of a sole destination;

A possibly fatal case

of “Co - Dependency”

(whatever that is)

​

Stephen W. Winslow