Fallen Trusses

Are you one more person I need to protect 

One more person from whom to hide

The real and the authentic

Me inside


Is the only thing you like about me

The only thing that we agree on

Or can you find a morsel of grace

To understand my song


If what I embrace in my thoughts and my mind

Is something you can't hug today

Do I just listen to when your passion speaks up

Or is there room for me to say


To say, to share of my discoveries

To explore the unknown with you

To maybe uncover together

What could be true


Is my need to hide just a feeling of fear

And thus denying your place as my friend

Is believing different, being different

Going to be the end


Maybe if I had been different when we met

You wouldn't have attracted yourself to me

Or maybe there was something else in me

That didn't threaten your identity


It has been a lonely world for me

To doubt what I believed

But it will be much lonelier

To doubt your love for me


I want to believe that I can be loved

For who I'm becoming to be

But more than that, I want you to know

That I'm okay with me


I'm okay with the journey I'm on

I'm just a bit insecure

Are you one more person I need to protect

I just need to be sure


I don't need to change you

Your passion is a beautiful thing

But I'm wondering if together

There may be a song that we still can sing


© Ruby Neumann





Poet's Note: Written March 26, 2021. I wrote this poem in the hot tub this morning.  I was finally able to paint in verse that which has been plaguing me for years.  As I have journeyed out from the house I spent most of my life dwelling in, I have felt a deep need to protect people in my life from what I envision is a collapsing house.  Am I protecting them or their house?  Is that house, a place in which I found comfort for many years, something I need to protect?  I don't think so anymore, but I feel like in order to keep my relationships, I need to protect.  So if I don't need to protect the house, am I needing to protect the people within the house.  And if that is the feeling, what does that say of their strength,  that they need me to hold up the trusses of their structure.  I can't do that when I have chosen not to dwell in the house.  


I need to let them as dwellers uphold their own house.  If the house is strong enough to stand, they will continue to dwell inside, but when they find that they can't hold up the trusses, they can then decide if dwelling in the house is a wise thing to do.   


Just reflecting on the emotion of the poem, the image of falling trusses came to me.  I know that calling the poem "Falling Trusses" may distract the reader from the pain in me as someone who feels that she has to hide her real journey from people she loves in order to preserve the relationships.  The pain is real, the pain is not for the house, it is for the people in the house.  I can't bring them out, they must either stay and hold up their structure or walk out on their own accord.  I just don't know if I can tell them that I have left my building.  I don't know if I can show them the faulty construction that led to the collapse.  I guess it is why I hide.   But are the relationships real if that is how I perceive them? (And am I really hiding if I post poems like this on the internet?  I guess it is the indirect approach… but so far it's not working) 


I long for the authentic.  I long for people to love me and like me regardless of my world view and my perspective on life.  I long for myself not to fear honesty.   I long for the day that I don't judge my friends and family based on their institution's creeds.  I long for Love to find a way.