Love Dummy
Love comes with strings.
No matter how we dress up our broken words,
no matter how we try to convince ourselves we’re over it—
we’re not.
We just forget long enough
until the enemy gets bored
and digs through the haystack of our healing
to pull out that one sharp memory,
just to poke us in the eye.
Suddenly we can’t see.
We’re blinded by pain that only needed our attention
to come back alive.
It pulls our eyes off our purpose.
I be minding my business.
But pain loves attention.
Distraction loves company.
And love… love always finds its way back to pain in my mind.
What is love if it doesn’t hurt?
They say, “No pain, no gain.”
But sometimes love unlocks buried memories—
the kind that wear triggers with no safety.
The kind that shoot straight to the heart
leaving holes in my soul
with no bandage big enough to stop the bleeding.
So I swim in my own shedded blood.
I don’t drown, though I’ve tried.
My mind and spirit survive…
but my body—
my body remembers everything.
So when love gets close,
my body wants to fight.
My body wants to run.
My body flinches like she knows something I forgot.
And truth is…
I can’t remember the last time I loved her like a man should.
She remembers more than I do.
There I go again…
This was supposed to be a sweet poem—
a story about friends falling in love.
But I can’t reach for love
without brushing against the barbed wire pain left behind.
It’s wrapped around my comfort zone
with jagged edges made to make me bleed
anytime I dare step over the fence
and love anyway.
They say love is patient and kind…
But they don’t talk about how impatient and cruel it can feel.
Not always, but sometimes.
Here I go again…
I had a beautiful love story—
but my strings got tangled in my brokenness.
Like a puppet,
I couldn’t object to what my heart wanted.
I became an object,
led by a broken man,
like Humpty Dummy, falling off the same wall over and over again.
Like a dummy,
I kept expecting love to fix what I never learned to name.
Like a dummy,
I gave love my soul,
strings and all.
My love language?
It’s spoken in sign language with broken hands.
I’m deaf to affirmation,
confused by kindness,
and stuck translating mixed signals
from a heart that’s been shattered and stitched too many times.
Still, I pour from a cracked cup.
Still, I move when I should stand still.
Still, I risk love again…
Here I go again…
Trying to find a glue strong enough
to keep my body together
so there’s no room for trauma
to crawl inside and play house.
Like a dummy,
I speak from the heart while the shadows pull my strings,
performing pain dressed up as love.
Or maybe it’s love
disguised as pain.
I don’t know anymore.
I just know I’m still loving somebody
with all my brokenness out loud.
Again.
-Incouraged
