The Land of Ex-girlfriends: #poetry #dVerse

I’ll wear my swishing, stunning skirt today
because today
I’m going to the land of ex-girlfriends: 
they wear their skin tan;
their hair pinned to perfection;
their nails manicured impeccably; 
I’m more
like a man
my appearance 
doesn’t own me
I try
then I loose interest; 
miss a beat
and they’ll be out
those ex-girlfriends 
from every corner of the street they’ll come
wanting my husband’s 
salary
and all the things I didn’t choose him for
and they will speak to him
snakelike
in his own tongue
not foreignly the way I do
conspiratorially 
insinuating 
intimacy
and understanding.
What a paean to 
self consciousness 
and self-doubt
this has been!
But really 
I don’t give a hoot
because I know
in all the swirling sea
of ex-girlfriends
that he will never find 
another one
like me.

Posted for dVerse Open Link Night. A stream-of-consciousness about self-doubt and self-love. I tried it without capitalising each new line this time. Let me know what you think!

18 thoughts on “The Land of Ex-girlfriends: #poetry #dVerse

Add yours

  1. Sounds like a story that has been playing in your head for awhile. Good to get it out of there. I like the format you used here, as it makes it feel like stream of consciousness.

    1. Yes, probably says more about my at-times messed-up psychology than anything else: but once you accept yourself you have nothing left to fear!

  2. I agree about the confidence, Ingrid, and the defiance in ‘my appearance doesn’t own me’. Once they’ve been identified for what they are, those ex-girlfriends don’t stand a chance – they already had it.

  3. I thought it was an honest dive and swirl into the fraught heart — how certain can we ever be of another’s love, or of our own? So much depends on it yet so much we can never know. I think too that poets are autistic in real matters — we so absorbed in the undertones and -surfaces that reality is so perplexing … Yet would we have it any other way? – Brendan

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: