Like most women I am enamored with love. I listen to women torch singers like Billie Holiday and Anita Baker. On some days, I fantasize what it would be like to sing like them. To publicly unearth my happiness, despair, and anger about the loves that didn’t work, the unrequited ones, the ones who got away. If only I could get up on stage, and sing my heart out. I imagine it would be cathartic. The only problem is I can’t sing and my name is not Bonnie Raitt. Another not so minor problem is I have no musical connections, and I always wear underwear when I am in public.

Instead I close the door to my bedroom and let it rip. One of my favorite he done me wrong and he won’t do me wrong again songs is ‘I Cannot be Denied’ written by Jerry L. Williams and sung by Bonnie ( I hope she doesn’t mind me callling her by her first name) on her outstanding album ‘Nick of Time.’ Jerry L. Williams also wrote ‘I Want a Real Man’ that appears on the same album.

“A true love story / is hard to find / can’t get no rest / got no peace of mind.” I sing these lyrics from the song even when my lips aren’t moving.

I’ve always loved Bonnie Raitt since I was a teenager. Lately my attachment to the sound of her voice and the lyrics of her songs has increased. This particular song mirrors in part what has happened to me in my life and is happening to the woman upstairs who is actually only visiting my neighbor. She is having a problem with love. I hear the subtle nuances of her relationship gone bad through the walls of my apartment. That is what it is like to live among couples and their guest you don’t know who blare their radios and squeak their beds at night without any inhibitions.

Last night while I was listening to these lyrics - "You say you gave / your heart to me / you put me down / you set me free / you said you’re deadly / everybody said you was deadly” - I heard these words come from above my head - “I didn’t call the cops on you. You gotta believe me. I didn’t call the cops”.

Words happen in the dark. People come out at night like hundreds of butterflies in the spring after the long sleep, vital energies rise and fly in the flame of life passions. I was witness to this flight.

“I didn’t call the cops. You need to believe me,” were spoken from an unattainable longing of a woman in love whose man had done her wrong. She was trying to save something she never had. I am not sure what the exact problem was. The walls are not paper-thin. From what I could hear, this man of hers had beaten her up, and there was a restraining order. She didn’t want him to leave her. He did. That night I could have turned the song up louder, let the woman hear its tough tender empowering tones. The woman was keening like a lone wolf in primal separation pain. There was nothing anyone could do. She had to go through the wall.

I drifted into sleep singing the words - “I 'm through with you / its over now / and in the past / gonna find me a man / with a love that'll last" from ‘I Cannot be Denied,’ wondering if the broken woman upstairs would telepathically hear them and be set free.

Elizabeth P. Glixman's poetry, fiction, and interviews can be read online at Outsider Ink, Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, Frigg, southstory, Eclectica, and 3 A.M. Magazine and in print in Tough Times Companion, a publication of the Institute on Violence and Survival at the Virginia Foundation For the Humanities, and several mass story market anthologies. She is currently looking for a publisher for her poetry collections, Voices At Night and Reliquary. Elizabeth has a BFA degree in studio arts and a Masters Degree in Education. To order Elizabeth's 'Good Girls Don't Get Sick' click here. To read a selection of Elizabeth’s work on the showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.