Leaving

This poem is about leaving an abusive life and starting on a new one.

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Leaving

As I headed out the door

he had the radio playing

I heard “ I'm leaving on a jet plane,

don't know where I'm to go!”

That's my very sentiment

I was finally leaving him

the terrible life

and the hell he put me threw

I had enough of

his abusive behavior

the belittling of me

my psyche has had it

So as I walk out

to begin my life

anew and fresh

I hold my head up

high!

Reviews

[Mother Maggie]

Wonderful work. As a woman who has been in that relationship and as one who works with others who've been burned by those flames, I can relate.


Bravo and Namaste

[James Hanna-Magill]

Dear Ice QueenJen

I thought it high time to have a look at your latest writing and I picked this after flicking through a number of your poems as I found an immediate spark of recognition. I didn't realise how large the spark at first!

You will already see that this review, my now having finished it, is probably the longest review I have ever done on WC. My reviews are often long, but not this long.

The reason that this review is so long is precisely because your writing triggered a huge emotional response in me.

I could have gone back and changed it, but decided to leave it as it is.

You will see at the end, I wander whether I haven't actually failed you in this review. In a way a lot of what I say is actually trying to work out in my own mind why my four long term relationships ended in response to your relationship failure and then becomes a letter to myself.

The way I review can vary depending on my mood or what I am reading can vary. My poetic reviews seem of late to take a very structured approach and that is what I am going to do here. But all my reviews will always give the writer a notion of the emotional impact their writing has had one me and this one has been HUGE!.

To my review.

1) Structure / rhyme / rhythm / punctuation / style:

Structure: Your poem has for stanzas, five lines in length apart from the last where you add a fifth line, single word envoy. So it has a well defined structure, which I like. It shows a degree of care for me in the writer behind the writing.

Rhyme: You choose not to.

Rhythm: At points it is to be found. But where you lengthen your sentences, the beat drops. I have no particular problem with that for reasons I will mention shortly.

Punctuation: You fully punctuate the first and last stanzas, but you don't punctuate the middle two at all. I have a personal preference, but it is just to my taste, that it is better if a poet full punctuates or doesn't do so at all. That way it comes a bit more consistent.

Others may have different views. But I will just leave you with the though. All it needs at least is a full stop at the end of the two middle stanzas so it's as they say, not rocket science.

Style: This fits broadly into the blank verse genre. Rather than being prose poetry, a piece written in the shape of prose but with poetic qualities, it is the reverse, a piece written in the shape of verse, but which is more like prose in style.

I have no objections. Poetry in the end is a burst of emotion and doesn't need to be definable as anything in my personal view.

So apart from two full stops, I am happy!

2) Use of English: Simple and the words used befit the meaning in my view.

3) Allusion / metaphor: You don't have any explicit example in this piece. But what you do then suits the simplicity of the language used and again therefore the message.

4) Meaning: The meaning is transparent from your title and the words of the piece. Whilst there is much merit in opaque writing, there is as much in transparency.

5) Impact: This is where I start to kick in and your poem starts to set off loud bells in my head and I go overboard.

As I often say, however as writers we believe we have an audience in our writing, and of course we do in one way, actually the substance of what is happening is the writer is having an intimate conversation with one reader at a time, the one holding the book or viewing it on a screen.

Impact then is a result of the relative life experience of author and reader.

Hence in this case my reaction is powerful based on my own and yours.

I have had four long term relationships with rather a lot of short ones in between.

But this is all about long term for you and for me.

Let me list how I felt they went but more to the point why and how they ended. And in doing so (as I am in Split, in much of my writing and in my 'About me) I wish to be 100% honest.

First relationship: My first true love. Our relation ship lasted about 15 years, during 12 years of which we were married and during 13 of which we were together.

The relationship ended because I was working so hard, I was rarely at home. I was often abroad, working on assignments. As a result she found someone else who was there for her and left me for another man in adultery. Indeed she committed adultery at least one other time in our marriage. I found out, she apologised and I let her error go.

There was no physical or mental abuse, unless you call not being there or adultery to fall inside that rubric. I don't.

But I can see the compulsion to work flat out as a symptom of my bipolar disorder and although I know it takes two to tango, and blame should perhaps not be apportioned, I feel in the end I was guilty party. I was the cause and divorce the natural result.

However what happened was that in leaving me, she broke my heart, and though it took about a year to go through the bereavement process, which involved constant tears and not being permitted to stay in the rental I was actually paying for in London, I am still scarred to this day.

Second relationship: It quickly followed the first on the rebound. It lasted 11 years, of which we were married 8 and together 9.

This time it failed because at the end my life fell apart as the symptoms of bipolar disorder showed themselves after a nervous breakdown and undiagnosed and unmedicated, my moods started to swing rapidly, in a variety of obscure ways and completely counter to my own morality, I actually committed adultery 5 times in five weeks but told my wife all about them.

In the end she divorced me for good reason, albeit it was my illness talking, but took me for nearly two thirds of my assets, when it should have only been 50:50 in a normal divorce or 100% to me as I had generated all the income and capital to share.

There was no physical abuse. But was I not torturing her emotionally in the end?

Again I see my self as the guilty party as very explicitly this time it was my illness which intervened.

I hope I am not boring you with this, but if you want a personal reaction from a reader, this is mine. Maybe I am also trying to rationalise in summary what I do already in Split and elsewhere in my writing.

Third relationship: It again quickly followed the previous one and lasted about 3 years. But this woman was 22 years my junior and we met in a mental hospital. Our relationship was often fiery as a result of our different disorders. There was much mutual emotional abuse going on.

But I ended finally for a series of reasons, one of which was that I ended up being consistently physically abused by her. That amounted to endless, punching, kicking, slapping and more. It may or may not surprise you that actually men can be abused physically in a relationship. I was. I never called the police on her at the time. Big boys don't. But in the end because of continuing threats after, I had to have a harassment warning placed on her by the police which meant no contact.

But again you will see that my illness intervened. I should never have undertaken a relationship with someone so young in a mental hospital. But illness or not, I assume all the blame because at 46 when she was 24, I should have acted as the more mature party.

Fourth and last relationship: This time there was a two year gap. But we were in a relationship for two, never married and lived together for about six months.

Absolutely clearly this time it was my fault and my illness talking. I was undermedicated I discovered at the end and had a number of minor manic episodes which my partner rode for a long time. In each case I was emotionally abusive to her, though I had no memory of the events after, part of the syndrome of the disorder. But it usually only lasted 6 hours before my mood stabilised.

At the end of our relationship for a variety of reasons I can now see in retrospect, not sufficiently medicated and starting to obsess over the world of WC I had probably the biggest episode I have ever had which for the first time became not only emotionally abusive on my part but also physically.

I still have no memory of that night because of my illness and I can only rely on my now ex-partner telling me what I did. She left me not unreasonably as a result last month.

I can see now why the huge episode happened. I was undermedicated, starting out on WC and thereby becoming more and more emotionalised and obsessive on it so that I spent all day on this site and my mood swings were more rapid and more aggressive over a month. In the process of getting there, I would be in floods of tears one day, then very sharp the next.

Again the relationship has ended. And as with the others, I still feel the guilty party. But I can also see as with the other three, the hand of my disorder as the causal factor.

The risk of relationship failure in bipolar disorder is significantly raised compared to the rest of the population. You will also notice that the relationships become shorter and shorter as my illness has progressed.

That all my long terms relationships have foundered in each case as a result of my own ill health is one of the biggest sadnesses in my life.

I feel in every case that my illness may explain my behaviours but it does not excuse them, so I find myself subject to endless guilt and now feeling I should not have any more relationships at all, because my illness will destroy them in the end. Experience teaches.

The length of this review, probably my longest ever, is triggered by my immediate emotional response to your piece.

That the review is so long is itself perhaps a result of my disorder.

If you wanted to watch a reader react to your writing and judge impact, I have certainly done that.

The job of the reviewer is to help and not hinder the writer and it is not simply for its own sake.

I worry that this review has in the end failed you, because I can actually see I am using the poem as a way of actually working my own angst about my relationships 'on paper' something we as writers often do.

I shall leave it as it is in any case.

7) Overview: Hugely emotive topic for me and well written.

I can only hope you derive some help from it.

I have from reviewing it.

With my warmest regards



James Hanna-Magill