The poetry I wrote to you was unlike
anything I have ever written and in reading it my soul prays you felt it is
unlike anything you have ever read. Your silence cast great shadows.
I have known since you went on your
way, there were no words to say or write for the day you would first read them.
They were written in the days I was able to write them for the potential
day when you might want to hear them.
If your grief is real and it ends
and your heart opens to what can be as a warm bath of kindness foaming in
empathy you may begin to seek what you may have repressed to dare not feel in
full throe. If your heart might decide that this poet has a purpose I
pray you read in varied lens these weeks a man’s search for love whispered upon
your stoop and cried for your grace. I could lie, but in my heart that is
why I write despite tears, for love is a poor poet’s food, hope his wine.
When you decided to end things, I
imagined your stoic eyes and saw the gray ghost under your skin. I saw
her crying in light inside you. I saw a woman in mascara and lipstick and
her face of her inner world held in her hands asking why she did it again, I
doubt you cried externally. I thought you felt the universe pulse and
were struggling to release control.
I saw you daring and powerful aglow
with confidence. I saw your intelligence and wit to combat anything
especially a man may attempt to throw at you. You breakneck drive a stick
shift for a reason. Your humor is frank, dirty, and peeling at the
haughty assumptions of the pompous. Your body is taut with the discipline
of participation, your mind erudite.
Your appetite is voracious for the
hues of life’s palette in artistic and cerebral tints. You laugh from
tongue to toe. You kiss like you mean it and wield ownership of your body
like a howl. You scoff the judgment of others. You explore the mind
in sun and the body till dawn. Your insecurities nest in a secluded
hollow like a magpie’s amassment.
You love your family and friends
deeply. You care. You notice your environment like an owl in
darkness.
You hear Sara Vaughn, Tom Waits,
Antony Hegarty, Billie Holiday, Jarvis Cocker, and Otis Redding with a
passionate ear. You dream gigantic, but I felt love sits like the pea
under a gypsy’s mattress, the element the magician’s prestidigitation intends
to veil.
Love to me is a vessel of choice
fueled by seeing someone that fits with another where the rest of the world
could fall away, but this fellow soul knows and complements the accoutrements
and peccadillos that make a person who they truly are. A lover knows and
sees the other’s core is exposed and reciprocates the risk for the passion of
surfing lighting fierce in a blur before death sneaks its scythe.
I felt I saw a cloaked parcel of
grief weighing on you. I felt your confliction to give permission to hold
on to see as if love was not a marauder. I felt you returned to your
rutted row. The kiss you gave my name fell like a letter back onto my
escritoire.
I felt the layers you stitch in lace
over ghost-blank cheeks wrapped that parcel in rules. Love’s ink washed
in the tide where mermaids dress like sirens. Sirens spin their tales and
entice smiles and cheers to joke with the men that talk cotton and bubblegum.
Twirl them about in a taunt-show of limbed expression in a distance to
play games with toys.
For as much as you may dub yourself
the siren and hath scratched me, I cannot help but see the mermaid behind a
mask. She submerged once more. I could not see why her face was so
wet.
I see the girl from your childhood
with fire in her soul using her adult body as vented expression controlling
outcomes. I see bird gerhl as this
insulated version of you timid to any flight reliant on love’s lift. I saw this yin yang struggle within between
the two to pilot one being searching how to be both.
I see grief as the pinion that binds
your heart’s wing as you flap and roar with your body’s wing. You appear
to suffer both as your sensitive heart exposes and retracts in cyclical battery
and your body exhausts itself in constant vigilance to prevent intimacy.
I felt I saw your grief. I felt I saw your heart. All I
wanted was to see you fly with two wings and you appreciate taking a journey
with me as you displayed your capacity without casting me as a snipe
hunter.
With me you have to know you broke
my heart, you broke my heart, the part that hopes, that had a damn sense of
calibration, of seeing people’s spirits, souls, and what makes a woman human.
My compass has no arrow, if this is not the bird painted in your skin.
My polarity of hemispheres is lost.
I know you probably will never want
anything to do with me. I sound like a lunatic, but I did not need six
months to register foundational aspects of who we each are built to be to
recognize the rarity. Capacity and certain fundamental aspects are either
present or not.
I was taught to dream big, hard, and
follow that six inch valley through the middle of my soul. I wanted you
to talk about and show me your life. In your taciturn façade I saw a
loquacious heart serving a ruminative mind to speak back to me in your reaction
to my poetry and the few sentences you would speak like an orca surfacing.
That is how I dare saw you and I must have been completely wrong.
As we continued to see each other
the lines you would emit to tell me how my inferences to weave a story of what
we both were experiencing made you feel and the smiles that would escape your
helm were like echoes from walls to a blind man using his sixth emotive sense.
I weighted them too heavily. I felt my approach was the roadmap you
needed to reach a vulnerable place. It was like a way of allowing the
inside sensitive you to take the reins into a wilderness you were wary to enter
and accept help to begin to describe yourself in open air.
I felt like that part of you does
not get out a lot. You keep your life super busy with jobs to where you
have a built-in excuse to not have anybody intimate of heart in your life.
Based on what you said you may never want that. If you treat
someone as invested as I was like you did me you probably never will have to
worry about love being in your life.
I needed your vulnerability to wax.
In your reticence I felt your trepidation. I respected your
requirement to warm the blood vessels before straining muscle. I felt like for you speaking to me in the
ways we were was like inching out on an iced lake. When the moment at the
top of the stairs happened, I felt that was either a start or you would pull
back and repress revisiting that vulnerable place. I could see how much
it took for you to say those words and be in that spot by the shadow of the
wall.
I felt this complementary amalgam of
pensive observer, rebellious vagabond, and creative artist. I had never
met anyone who resonated in tone and pitch with those three parts of me.
It frightened me. When you talked about the rules and fears within
yourself I felt the stitching of your emotional boundary both fraying and
tightening.
I thought maybe you freaked out in
reflexive denial to push me away. It was too much too soon and you needed
time to rearrange things on your terms. I wrote in my pain.
The clamor probably pushed you further into a cocoon of the sterile.
The psychological trigger that you
could not speak to me in your exit broke a patched levee in my heart from the
women that came before you. You had no way of knowing that. My
apology for that behavior remains.
I wish I had told you nothing.
Fragments only add to confusion. The piece-meal explanation of some
of my past only subjugates the honesty of that which I felt was uniquely
present in this experience. I am ashamed at my inability to die with
honor and accept I was just wrong.
I misread everything. Even if
I was somewhat on track no one should be expected to be a mind reader. I
leaned on my intuition heavily because I thought we had this mutual understanding
that you needed the crutch of my poetry to share your soul to the level the
sensitive inner you wanted, but the outer rejects. I felt my analogies
became shortcuts through a maze. Like I could help us without you
venturing that limb to ask for help, but to expect me to do that would be
arrogant.
There is no front door with you.
The only way in is a secret passage most people could never decipher.
I think that is why you treated me like a burglar.
When you left the tempest spun a
torrent of lost-joy, grief, frustration, longing, and bewilderment. The
accuracy of the emotional mechanisms that I felt when I looked in your burning
eyes over those weeks had never before fired off with such perspicuity in
encountering the gauntlet of a human I was attempting to care. I misread
you.
I rambled; I was confused; I was
hurt; I was lost. I apologize for the intrusions upon your personal
sanctum, but I do not apologize for the passion or the feeling of being at the
precipice of such potential. I know I let my passion go too far, but to
me that iceberg was real. I needed time to just back away.
In that reflection I feel like your
email and your departure were less about me and more about what you needed and
potentially your grief. You may never want to be vulnerable to let
anybody in because true intimacy may smell like a burnt passport.
I think to some degree I was made
the way I am to share human experiences to help myself and others open from
deep within. I see the cogs of your queer heart as built to inspire and
flower.
I saw us have having complementary
areas of uncomfortableness. You may challenge me to be easier on myself,
to be less seriously dark and play more in the outer world of light. I
may challenge you to bring your inside personal emotions out to embrace the
vulnerability of a common undefined darkness to not sequester alone within your
core as you dance in your midnight crowd of light.
I see us like the sun and moon in
that way. You are the moon; at night your outside lights up venting the
inner; in day you are dark your inner goes to shadow. I am the sun; at
night I appear to vanish, but I am a constant in my dark core in an unstoppable
fusion of condensing elements of the universe. In day I blind the world
with a business suit and math hiding a platypus-writer behind a right brained
stereotype. In night you tease the world with a grin fueled from
distance.
The sun needs the moon to reflect
what he has to offer as without her no one can ever look at his essence
directly. The moon needs the sun to be seen in her dazzling glory like
the purpose of a man dancing is to let the woman show off. He supports
her like the vase to her flower or the ray to her leaf.
Each shifts taking turns in the seen
and unseen, overlapping in phases always present in what most viewers would
never comprehend. The sun nor the moon needs to be adjacent every moment.
Yes each needs to pass in phase, but each needs their alone. The
knowledge the other exists in distance brings balance. They share their
eclipses, their wax and wane in cycles of crescent and full, the tide and
growth of oceans. Each knows what the other needs to survive.
The sun will never be a moon.
The moon will never be a sun. The balance in the never births the
beauty of the Earth like a relationship both participate to breathe life, love,
and equilibrium through a shared vessel.
You told me you could never be what
I needed. What if I was a sun needing a moon? What if I needed love
from a natural distance? What if you were a moon needing a sun?
What if that is the nature of this gravity?
Your three a.m. nights in the
Marigny, mine at my escritoire. Both are needed to maintain orbit.
You may have read me. I may have come to see you dance, but each is
primarily a solitary endeavor. Art is the compulsion of the soul. I
thought maybe you would understand the space I need to write, because you
understood the space you need to dance. I saw a fire of empathy.
How good a fit you thought we might
be I doubt you would ever admit even thinking about. I wished you to care
for me. I wanted to go to a soft and tenacious place like a kind forest
fire. I wanted to replenish soil in each of us after such years to here.
I mean this in as much sincerity as a heart can offer being piloted by
the vividness of the mature humanity we shared to encapsulate a period of time
in my life that altered me and I probably will never forget.
I see the reflection of your stoic
eyes that peered into me. I held curiosity of ever finding a package of
such strange and gorgeous raw humanity. I thought I saw something you
were feeling that obviously was not there. I thought you saw a similar
human amalgamation in me. I felt the heart of a woman make a man with an
irrational certitude remove his atheist spectacles and peer with the sun’s rays
of God to see a soul at a patio table, a folding chair, a Vietnamese booth, a
floor, a sofa, and a bed.
I saw her and the image makes me cry
for daylight into the tears of fate’s turn. I felt I saw grief close a
conflicted heart. If you wish to exit that treadmill to chance love’s
parlay that is a decision you have to make for you. That decision would
appear to involve facing whatever you are holding. If you wanted to pull
from my humanity to ease that burden I was willing to be human for you and
channel my logistics to facilitate that sincerest vocation. I know even
if that were true you do not want me to be that human.
I felt that pensive recondite
iceberg within you driving my gravity; it may have never existed but I thought
I felt it frozen behind your grief. I accept that I am most likely wrong
in my premise concerning your grief, but in my heart it is what makes the most
sense to me given what little I know and my faith in spiritual intuition.
In the end it is a function of
timing, want, and dreams. The idea that a sun can write a letter to a
moon like this and expect her to read, absorb and contemplate each paragraph is
rare. I showed you more of me than most people have seen, even those I
have known for years. It may be the best thing for you to avoid intimacy.
I am sure your internal desire to avoid such comes from deep roots.
Your stoic lips and brooding eyes
have lashed me so. If you ever see me again, please do not smile.
Either give me that ghost face blank veil or nothing. For if you
smile or laugh or joke I will witness physically just how wrong I know I was
and feel like an innocuous denizen of the crowd. For in your stillness is
how I felt the pulse of the universe, beat, beat, beat...
Severus
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