Oct 8 - Letters to Luna - A Letter from the Sun to the Moon pt1

Luna,                                                                                                                         

A Preface:

This letter is written from an ink well of humility with an audacious happy quill.  I know you are not interested in communicating with me.   The feelings I have are some of the most complicated I have ever had.  I am not sure what yours ever were.   I felt hurt because I thought you had this package you were going to say at some point to offer a manner of balance to the communication I provided.  You vanished in smoke.  

I fell down and apart.  I wrote a lot of words I regret founded in haste and pain.  I wish I would have had the strength to take a breath to better absorb the blow to focus more on what this was rather than on myself.  I feel my words crowded you.  I had a lot in my head.  I needed to cool. 

I wanted your empathy and more complete explanation.  This letter is a collection of my settled thoughts, ponderings, guesses, confusion, some redundant, but ultimately the picture of the limited view I experienced in meeting you in the absence of that explanation as I have had a sufficient time to ruminate.  In today’s lunar eclipse the universe told me I was done.  

I do not know you.  I thought we shared a brief but gouging period where we saw each other deep.  My perspicacity to read you at the time felt like something bigger than myself.  I felt spirituality.  To have that so one-sided hurts tremendously and evaporates my certitude.  

I know not who you saw inside me.  When you looked in my eyes I thought I sensed something that you must not have felt.  I felt a light I have searched for from my youth gleaming from a common darkness.  

In that I am happy for the joy you brought me.  Knowing I could feel like that, that a being like you exists makes me smile from toe to head.  I am so thankful for the hope.  I had not hoped like that in years.  I felt you in my bones and so close to Thunder Road. 

I sensed your life like a celluloid reel flipping over a projector’s illumination.  The images blurred, but I thought I could see your foundation.  I felt you reviewing your history and recognizing parallels as I would speak.  You would emit a sentence, a quip, a footnote like a flash.  I would weave the threads in my poetry to better understand the bigger picture in your world.  I felt the way you reacted that I was somewhat on target.  I felt the pieces were coming together; now they feel like a storm of pixies thieving from my mind. 

I asked myself, “What would I want if the roles were reversed?”  I would want to be respected in my space, my feelings, and my decision.  Even if the other party did not understand they should respect my judgment and where I needed to be.  

I know you to be a deeply contemplative person.  I assume the bulk of the way you interacted came from a deliberated place.  I feel pulled towards two hemispheres.  One is simplistic you were evaluating and said, “No, not really doing it for me, not who I want in any part of my life.”  The second involves grief deeper within you resulting in a similar outcome via a much more complex thoroughfare.  

If it is so simplistic the way you handled it feels cruel.  Although you called yourself selfish and a scorpion, I saw such labels as grief making space.  The way you interacted with children, cats, your singer friend by the food truck, and looked at me, I saw kindness like a porcupine.  I saw a happy woman who carried a pebble in her pocket.  If it is grief, well that breaks my heart for an entirely different reason than it already is.  Both your indifference, a legion of alternatives, and grief can be true, but I thought you barricaded me to protect a portion of yourself.

This was an extremely personal experience for me.  In the clarity of time to sort I am drawn to believe the reason you chose to stay silent and not answer my questions despite pouring my heart out to you is that there is a counterweight behind the labyrinth you have manifested for anyone to get close or be privy to your thoughts.  

I looked at this and felt there is such a small chance that my guesses to the roots of your choice are even correct, and an even lower one that if that were to be true that it would change anything.  If this did come out of the place in you I think it did then you are and were already aware of that when you made your decision.  If I were in your shoes I would want to know that someone thought so much of me to try to witness my soul with such soft-bravery even if he looked in the wrong hemisphere.  I would want to know I touched a human heart so dearly. 

So this letter comes from the humble place that if I am wrong on the premise of a grief you carry which by no means defines you, but appears present then I am completely misguided.  If this does have to do with a place of grief, then you knew that then and I write these words to express my deepest empathy, a manner of human love from a distance, a measure of who I am, why I feel the way that I do, what I feel, and a semblance of prayer that if you ever exit that place and wish to seek me and be personal I hope you do.  

A Body:

I held you in my thoughts like acrylic poetry painting your portrait in poems from St. Marks to the ones I never shared.  My expatiated letters attempted a prismatic bridge.  I tried to introduce you to my heart painted in a language you were able and amenable to converse.  The resin was deep with coded-distance to allow space in the personal I felt we each needed.  

Part of me wants to know if what I painted resembles you.  If you see yourself as you read my words, I hope you see a greater hand at work.  I do not know how I saw you so resplendently bare if I did.  My vision went to the crevices of my heart for tincture and dye.  I painted this portrait to try to reach your soul as I truly saw you to help you see mine.

I do not think you like to feel examined.  Such portraits may make you feel invaded or restricted to a hue or curve.  I know you are much more than anything I have written or write here.  These are but fingered brush strokes on a beachhead by a man that saw but grains.  My audacity to write of your soul comes from the radiance I felt from your imperfect beautiful peculiar being not to define, only to see and reach authentic.  

I felt like me pressing your body against a wall gripping your nape had dual emotion, but that emotion was comfortably below the surface where you could pretend either portion was absent.  My poetry traversed at a similar depth behind metaphors.  I wrote in my space, you read in yours.  The vessel between us allowed you a manner of secret garden to reflect and decide through forking paths.

When I tried to hug you on the sofa after you told me about your friend I felt like that was taboo.  The emotional would have been too close to the surface.  The lack of a buffer of lust might have made you think too directly about emotions present whether affection or other and pressure to define to yourself what was transpiring.  There is a unique distance which you appear to require like a prerequisite for interaction, like terms of engagement.  Without it you appear to disguise, conduct arson, and flee.  

I never felt I understood a heart more with so little seen and then felt so completely fatuous.  I ponder rejection or repression.  The image of your heart I envisioned is one of the most vivid I ever felt.  To think that was a mirage is to acknowledge my ineptitude and your indifference.  

A subtle smile, halcyon cheeks, and scattered comments of pleasure and appreciation conveyed you understood my writing.  Those oiled words were a ribbon of the better kisses I have ever received.  I felt I saw your soul’s pigments in an emulsion of your stillness.  

You are abstruse, frightening, and beautiful.  Each word is tattooed in a cipher within your flower petals.  Stroking your back felt like the map to the grotto of Monte Cristo in its darkness and light.  I feel like it would take a PHD in emotions to decipher attempting to get close to you.  I thought I had.  I felt like I met a fellow alien.

I felt like there might be some infinitesimal percentage of humans capable of navigating caring for you or trying to build something like love through your bulwarks.  I feel like you took advantage of my kindness and my abilities to approach a connection with you expressing so little on the outside and putting me into a position to make assumptions from my intuition.  You dared me to walk the plank with my poetry and vanished as I submerged sodden  

I searched my thoughts trying not to see you as this cruel woman playing a game with me like I was a sophomore cog in a cycle of relationships where people try to get close and you auto-pilot an escape as if each was trying to control or tell you what to do in some way.  I got the impression you have an intense aversion to the concept of being controlled so that any dynamic resembling a relationship you may view the other party like a warden and negate your internal needs for companionship and intimacy.  

When I think of control and Luna, I think of what you told me about being big on rules, your mother’s penchant for asking you to apply yourself, your reaction to your coworker in the story at the bar, how you founded the burlesque scene at the club in Arizona, the way you drive, the focus in your self-made costumes, your grit to work in a corrections facility, and most of all the compartmentalization between your careers and your inner personal world. 

In trying to review why you vanished, you mentioned the question you asked me about what I wanted and somehow out of that you put me in that box of whistles, cuffs, bars, tire-boots, suburban hell, and uniformity.  I felt marginalized like I did not understand what it was like to live in three worlds: the light of a day job, the artistic shadow of night, and the darkness within. 

I sensed a woman wanting to ride a horse topless through fields reading a book with kick ass toe polish.  I felt like she wants to run with the wind and cannot imagine any man understanding her enough to make a relationship work.  She needs space, options; it makes me feel like your choices were taken away in your past and you keep them close to your essence like that necklace. 

At times I naively prayed this was an issue of your bravery to confront the ghosts that haunt your soul.  As if you might trust what I appeared to be, that I was as beautifully complicated, that we might actually understand each other.  Maybe you had a margin for error.  You were allowed to be labyrinthine and I would give you the benefit of doubt to go at the speed you needed so you would not feel to detonate and feign a shallow impervious heart or an assembly-line mind.  Neither of us is traditional or meant for the white-wash storefront. 

I am a grown man who does not put himself out there lightly or open his heart on a regular basis.    Most women I meet I don’t see the capacity to interface with the kind of interaction I need and want, so I am quiet, evaluate, and go on my way. 

I wrote so copiously to sort.  I hoped you would break character and show vulnerability about what really happened.  What you wrote on the surface I found extremely hard to accept as the whole story.  Now I have accepted you do not want anything to do with me, but I saw such a personal side of you that conveys you are grieving and blocking emotion out in a war within yourself.  Maybe that is delusion, a lie I have meandered to comfort myself, but that is what my spirit feels.  I admit I am probably completely wrong. 

I think you are happy with a productive positive life.  I do not see you as depressed.  I see you as a vibrant woman.  When I refer to grief I intend to convey something else. 

Grief in my experience is a like a sleeve of tattoos that are like lead on the skin.  Pictures of people I have loved, roads with cars going too fast in the curve, God’s morphing identity, immutable mistakes like lessons life repeats until absorbed.  I learned how to live with the tattoos, make my body stronger to lift them, wash the metal in my blood, and be happy.  However sometimes the lead is like that of an x-ray blanket; one becomes wary of anyone peering inside because you know it feels like death so the grief becomes like armor. 

Most people who have not seen enough of the darkness do not understand.  For beings capable of emotions like a violinist might wield a bow or a sculptor can mold clay, for people with big detailed internal worlds where the stimuli from barrooms to books is so vividly remembered, grief is a function of how deeply a soul feels.  Certain kinds of people hold more, feel more.  So when we go through something pretty hard a picture on our inner wall gets painted with the darkness.  It cannot be extirpated.  Some experiences graft like skin after a burn and we evolve in that darkness like adding wings to cross canyons or irises to see in pitch. 

That is how I see your grief as an adaptation you carry, not necessarily as a direct sadness, but as something like a splinter buried or a tattoo that is merged which is more a matter of living with than jettisoning. 

Darkness to me is beautiful.  I am at home in darkness.  I like to imagine the infiniteness of the universe when I close my eyes.  In the light, rooms are defined, walls exist.  In the darkness anything can happen.  Vulnerability to the unknown is the mandatory precursor to love itself.  The beauty of the darkness is owning fear, accepting that fear is a necessary component of the courage to live life authentically.  That possibility of life bends me ecstatic in luscious joys. 

Darkness is my writer’s ink well.  I write of dark things in the human experience because I find beauty as the outsider challenging why people do what we do expanding people who might not want to go to the undefined place I live every day.  I always have another question and space in the darkness to explore.  Writing in the light is an arena I will visit, but I do not live there.  

I find light restrictive, too crowded with superfluous objects detracting from the deeply personal universe of relationships I wish to reside.  I am often numb to the allure of the commercial or appearances.  I am at home in a happy darkness.  I see people’s raw insides.  I see the universe.  I treasure the shelter cat, the protestor, lengthy conversation on a bar stool, oil grease smeared on pant legs, books, horrible mistakes, and above everything love.  

Seeing grief the way I do, I feel like you are carrying something that prompts some of the distance you demand.  Only you know, but in this letter I hope to convey why I feel that way and my empathy. 

I have never felt like anyone could understand me the way that I need.  Your mind is what drew me to you.  Your capacity to read my words made me floored, prolific, and afraid.  Your layers to operate, hide, and interact are peculiar, fascinating, and made me feel a sense of spirituality with how those quirks appeared to fit with mine.

The intensity of that mutual empathy created gravity like a forming planet.  I think for you the swell may have felt like a commitment vortex as if recognizing such familiarity was to accelerate definition like sliding down a hole.  I wanted a slow evolution for the structural to lay groundwork for any emotional.  

My interest was not a bola; it was open oceans.  I know my letters added to that mass.  My pleonastic expression assumed an iceberg-like volume inside your mind displayed in relatively terse verbalization as a counterbalance.  I felt the weight of your unconfirmed ponderous thoughts contemplating, but wary of the potential energy.  

That iceberg of your cogitative reflections was the root of my gravitational interest.  I was endeared by the way I pictured your thoughts, the way I inferred your mind works.  

I saw a girl who grew up smart, embraced her sexuality, and hid part of herself as if she was pulled between worlds.  I saw her as a reader, a book-lover, quiet, and her body became her instrument of expression.  I saw Roald Dahl’s precocious Matilda educating her parents. 

Maybe you hid from certain exposed emotions.  Your dancing reminds me of Maya Angelou’s childhood mutism to a degree.  She chose writing and you to move your body.  Inside each of you were stories, dreams, and a tempest.  (Ms. Angelou was also a dancer.) 

Maybe you saw things differently from the darkness.  Maybe the fun quirky boundary pushed things out and kept others from entering.  Maybe the tender, analytical, complex, cerebral, breathtaking emotional you kept way in like fires at the center of Earth fueling a divine machine that vented through rebellion, art, music, and dancing.  

Outer beauty and the physical to me are often the prosaic; the mind and spirit are poetry.  I have pursued balance.  I was a swimmer, a wrestler, and now I do yoga.  All involve delinking conscious thought with positioning the body in a fluidity with the unconscious mind moving with the flow yet aware of everything that is happening in the moment.  One is only dependent on the self.  It is like one’s soul is watching his body operate automatically and goes to an ethereal place.  In the water, against another body, or within my own, I link the intimacy of knowing what a body can do with the deeper parts of the mind.  I felt your dancer legs the same way, the drive in you to live your nature through your body from deep within and know your body intimately.

Your inner mind is what moved your body in the darkness and spoke to me like a wildfire and a sage.  If in our talks that iceberg of contemplation in your conscious and unconscious mind was not really behind your eyes and silence, if you do not really think in such layers, maybe that was my misinterpretation.  

I felt the power and torrent of the life I felt you must have lived to be present in the energy and substance that you presented.  I cannot silence and you could not speak.  I sought to be quieted and hear your loquacious voice obsequious to your deliberations release to open air.  I wanted to lay down my pen and you your recondite guard.  I am vexed if it was always my delusion.  

I felt your thoughts were like tidal waves for a sea creature that contemplates inside a tsunami and does not move an inch.  She watches and absorbs.  I felt behind each trickle emitted there was an esoteric whirlpool restrained.  I question my intuition. 

You seem to me like scattered puzzle pieces absent corners, all curves.  You are flowers, amoebas, feathers, wrist watches, fins, nymph, horns, feline, mascara, coffee, nail polish, zipper-boots, pulp, and a pointed tongue.  You are painted raven locks twirled in fingers like kindling. 

You are seeds in the whim of the wind, stockings, sex, a sphinxlike smile, wings, Jung, dryad, fable, quirks, spiked heels, laughter, shadow, books, antlers and Etta James bedding Glen Danzig against a wall asking for what she god-damn wants.  You are the student in the lecture hall that knows the answer and does not raise her hand, because knowledge is all that matters. You are beads, gypsy-badass, corsets, cat whiskers, opera-burlesque, analytic look-out, grief, fortunes, guts, silk, and leopard spots.  

You communicated you do not wish to bring the possibility of a road to a manner of intimacy with anyone.  I thought your heart was at the impetus of caring for me spiraling tendrils as you floated in your sea only to be truncated by your greater need for isolation and psychological and emotional barriers to intimacy and vulnerability.  I feel foolish.  

The autonomous junction of deliberation traffics legions of trains.  One can only purchase a single ticket in any instance.  To enact body to seat, vision to horizon, and the bellows of one’s intention to stoke the steam of one’s direction is best attempted as a consortium united in the now.  Past tracks are irreversible.  Time masters all in the confluence of exchange between choice and the platform of the present. 

All the train seats, all the glances out of windows, all the feelings of people and nature rushing and pacing by, none struck me as authentically piercing to my native cells as you.  I wish that was not the case.  I wish I could lie to myself.  I know I misread your silence to a pathetic extent. 

It was the way you looked at me expressionless almost stoic.  You rarely smiled or looked me directly in the eye, like you were afraid or your natural inclination repressed to smile as I might see your vulnerability pulsing.  It was like your heart was right there under your white skin almost like a ghost of this life you have lived.  The feeling I thought I read from those looks touched me so dearly endemic as if the hue in your iris was from a common star of atomic birth. 

I felt like you saw me peer with my telescopic heart.  I thought you saw how strange I was and saw me as a beautiful man who you were reluctant to care for because I entered on my terms seeing what you barely verbalized.  I thought caring for me scared you.  Your feelings and my manner of entry both broke your rules.  I did not know there was a guard tower.  I simply saw you as if you were sitting on a park bench reading a book and you became the page.

I felt like if you did not feel the spiritual part flowing you would have been more playful, you would have chatted more nonchalantly, you would not have looked so serious or pensive.  I took your quiet reservations as the paradoxical way you naturally display interest, cautious joy, and focus.  It seemed fitting for a woman deluged with impersonal surface plaudits via the internet or an audience to pare down what is real in her pensive dervish.  

The phone applications are omnipresent beckoning for performance to expectations.  Callers always need.  Everybody wants and you barely rest.  

I figured you have your guard up most of the time.  Random men must hit on you frequently.  You have to maintain a distance with your clients as a professional necessity.  I took the looks you gave me as the exposed you, that you would never give to them.   

I thought you had unique mannerisms that were less straight forward.  I guess the lack of a smile was really just that.  I mean you smiled at me, but when we would talk about certain topics or more so right before you would let something out you would look at me and I felt like your mind was a bee hive and your face a placid still deep lake.  

I felt the muse in you likes to perform crafting the world necessary to survive her currents.  I found it playful and beautiful, yet I wonder how the enigma supplements the sharing of your inner world so that maybe you feel a need to partition.  

I thought you saw kernels of what you are seeking in this universe in my writing and it attracted you to me.  I felt the muse in you got off a bit on the idea of a poet writing of you and adventures you participated.  I am not sure if I was just a plaything.  Part of you goads the voyeur to watch your movements and wisps.  The poetic inspirations may become part of your artistic shadow in this universe like dangling sparkling children.  I saw sexuality in the exchange.  

I think you were shielding the outer side of the dancer in you from me.  I wanted to experience a full you and you to understand that is why I was pursuing you.  I felt I met you in reverse to most of your acquaintances.  I met the passion behind the dance, like the seed before the flower.  It made me feel special, but I wanted to learn both curves.  

Whether you structurally or factually shared your tales emotionally I felt I saw a lot of your soul, but little of your life.  I wanted to know your stories to witness your path.  

I imaged nights of you growing up egging death’s stare and you grinning back in bayou moonlights.  I imaged a high school wilderness in and out your house.  Drinking pushed boundaries as flasks to toy with what other people’s lives may fret, but I imagine you grew numb to the outer verboten early.  Maybe to you pulp fiction was art and a park of comradery.  I can’t really picture you giving a fuck what anyone would think or doing something just for the attention.  Maybe you use to and grew out of it?   

Maybe in dancing you had a home and part of it was rebellion from your mother or some initial form of self-definition, but I saw you as dancing for the art, the professionalism, and because you wanted to for you.  I imagined you probably loved dancing as a little girl and burlesque was one of your dreams.  Maybe the bars, the stage, the pasties, the exposed skin; the drinks are play to watch other people act like it was something shocking or exotic.  I imagined for you it was just normal; it was you.  I took it was a palette for creativity.  

I didn’t think you really cared much what people thought, but you kind of liked that they looked, that they wanted to grab, but couldn’t.  I think you liked teaching and stretching people’s worlds, especially men.  I see control in it.  They sit and watch.  You decide what they see. 

In my distant ignorant perception it seemed like the nucleus in your burlesque was to make sure the personal fueled your art, but remained hidden.  You could be this sensitive contemplative tempestuous soul disguised in a gypsy.  The audience gets almost everything, but not that.  I saw you in a loud room watching it all, bonding with your friends, doing your art, putting in the work to your standards of theatrical and personal creativity and laughing happy, but your head was usually contemplative and that set you apart like the sea creature in her tsunami.

I saw a split.  Like the reason you went online is intimacy requires meeting Luna before stagename.  Like stagename is a reverse treadmill, an expectation manifested in trying to speak the last word of a sentence before the first.  I am sure you have no problem meeting men, but I imagine much of your social world orbits stagename and Luna nests like that Matryoshka doll coming out in the quiet.  I felt the inner you sought my quiet.  Maybe she was scared to show me the full.  Your worlds might collide and we both might have had to stare at happy.

I felt underneath your glitter, costumes, and books or at your computer typing evaluations you were searching for genuine experiences like touchstones on this Earth to share droplets of your inscrutable essence at a comfortable distance allowing both freedom and intimacy.  I pictured you had many friends, good wonderful people in your life, but maybe you can only get so close, experience only so much of the spectrum.  

A great friend can empathize, share a drink, a hug, a laugh, a marvelous talk, but they cannot embrace in that orb-like place inside and honor it with the complete vulnerability and reverence of personal love that in reciprocation is the pinnacle of ecstasy and unilaterally can be the nadir of perdition.  

There is a personal part of all of us that can only be touched in a certain way.  I felt you hold that back from everyone and terrified to let anyone in there.  I felt like I was so close to it for a moment.  You appear to expose your humor, scandalous provocateur, and on occasion wink of how truly smart you are or a release of your contemplative sensitiveness, but the timeless personal depth stays very low.  I felt you showed a bead of it to me at the top of the stairs.  As you returned to your regular life exposed maybe your rationalizations, of who you are to yourself, collapsed a tunnel to restore your hibernation.  The owl flew back into the darkness. 

I sense you feel intimacy threatens your concept of latitude.  You need to feel unencumbered: no saddle, no reins, and no rider.  Somehow I feel this also translates as no horse can run alongside you.  For if there were a fork in path, the want to go with the other becomes a limitation to your freedom.  How is a woman ever to love if her very want for the other drives her apart from him?  

As a poet I see love’s ubiquitous fractals.  I see healing in love’s presence and perniciousness in love’s absence.  None are more precious as the kiss of God embodied in the temple of hearts sharing in giving their entirety in utter vulnerability to the other knowing there is no safety net.  Love is the only religion I have.  Yoga and music are as close as I get to church. 

I see your fear and pain from something you carry to put yourself in a position to offer or accept love.  I felt this as grief in you like you had this parcel.  In your correspondence you called it being scared like fear, but I saw it more as masked grief.  

I felt there was an intimate personal weight you have probably dealt with in your path of growth for years.  The way you sat on the sofa soaked in your friend’s illness left you even more naked than the chairs by the river.  I felt you grieving her pain and your grief came closer to the surface.

I felt this grief is what prevents you from entertaining the intimacy I felt in the room when I was with you and is ultimately what I feel is the reason you pushed me away so vehemently.  As if you know in your struggles to free yourself from this grief you know you can never approach love as long as its vampire bite swirls in your blood.  

It is as if on that train in your mind you know the coupled seat in the row in which you sit is occupied by this hand bag.  You look at it, think of jettisoning the lot dreaming the parcel will transmogrify into a bird flying wings instead of nesting a demon.  

I pull much of your actual declaration of what my emotions detected before your statement of them from these emails five days before you departed after which your face never returned to my purview.  The triple periods in your letters sit like grammatical contemplation.  The swath portrays pause during composition pondering, distraction, return, and revision like added weight.  

The idea that you consciously made the extra effort to add the addendum and explicitly state in an interrogatory what you did in the second before my response to the first says volumes about the layered way in which your mind appears to hold things back and your reluctance to release directly.  You crossed that line within yourself, but showed the trepidation, so much so that you could not use a declarative.  Then in less than a week a complete retraction. 

“I usually read your emails and poems at least five times the day I receive them, then they go into a box, Letters. 

In between our meetings, while waiting for the next subscription I open the box and reread them...I think it is to remind me of how intoxicating your words are, extrapolating the underlying meanings, the effect they have on me...like sinking into a warm bath.  

Then on the days of our actual meetings, I go through the things I am scared of when it comes to dating or relationships...being tamed, domesticated, vulnerable, monogamy. 

I think that is why when I first see you, I may have a look of fear or anxiety for the first, oh.. three, five, to fifteen minutes depending on the trials and tribulations of my day. It's some form of head space back into reality transition. Akin to eyes adjusting to the bright sun from being held captive in the darkness, deep breath, and it's not so scary. I have difficulty staying in the now when left to my own devices, comparing past to present, from future expectations. I do not fair well when others start planning for me. I require lots of time, I need to be the redwood or it will end in flames. 

And your letters make me angry, because how dare someone else see me, with me barely saying anything at all. When reading them...it is all at once suprise, acknowledgement, and warmth...then I get nervous, the owl wanting to fly back into the darkness. I enjoy spending time with you and I am scared. Scared I will hurt you as I have hurt so many before in my past. And I realize what's done is done and that has passed, I can make my future daily, remaining still and contemplative. This time around, molasses speed, as to quell my fears of being trapped.

Last night...I think my favorite part was reading on the sofa with your arm circled around my ankles.”

“You do realize I'm starting to have feelings for you, right?” 

You mention approaching me is like coming out of darkness into bright light implying exposure.  You mention the difficulty of staying in the now, as if the past is in your thoughts attempting to replay itself to commandeer your behavior.  You mention your anger at me not requiring much verbal communication to be able to see you.  I listened to everything you exposed me to including your soul’s participation and confliction.  It is in part the perception of that confliction that confused me so much to prompt my writing as if there is so much more held back. 

I am poet.  We are built to see souls.  You do not have a little soul Luna.  You have a gigantic old soul and I felt it natural for someone like me to see.  We are both analytical thinkers living behind the walls we have crafted for ourselves.  I hide behind accountancy’s pragmatism, you a psychologist’s one way-communication.  

You said you were scared of hurting me like so many in your past.  This line cuts the most deeply of any.  It is like you knew what you were about to do.  

I think of the Cripple and the Starfish song, “It’s true I always wanted love to be hurtful and it’s true I always wanted love to be filled with pain and bruises.”  It leads me to sense a flood of helplessness inside you that breaks my heart.  I feel like there was this part of you that wanted to reach towards me but the gravity on the other side was too strong.  I took the source of that gravity as your grief. 

This is where I feel my thoughts of you most tenuous.  I do not know if you really wanted to reach to me.  I felt and in a manner hoped that this was an intense process for you.  I am reluctant to accept your indifference.  

I hoped the feelings you related in these messages related to a precursor emotion anchored in your being for me to understand how you could block me so completely and read my confused, pain-filled, and emotional letters and act like we just had coffee a few times casually, nothing was opening, and this was all in my head.  I felt such callousness.  

After taking time to back away from my pain (I focused a lot on myself in my hurt) I thought it must be something you carry.  I thought of what you told me at the top of the stairs.  I thought maybe you had been waiting for a unique soul to relate to how complex you appeared to be, but never thought such a being existed, let alone trust your intuition.  I thought of what you might have been through that you were reluctant to express, how I knew only you could open yourself, and how you might lash back at who you felt was the outer-source asking you to share.  

I thought of grief.  Your grief sits like a weight of lead on my crestfallen and empathetic heart instead of my anger.  I want to know the truth of how wrong I was.  Believing that I understood you when I obviously did not ripped my soul.  

You hit me in my poet soul’s intuition.  I ache in what I am built to be.  Misreading you so badly was like telling a musician is off rhythm, an actor is contrived, or a baker’s confections tastes banal.  I felt it so real I could hear the song, see the play, taste the bread of part of who I thought I saw deep inside you.  Now I am so confused I do not know if any of that was real.  

The statement, “Then on the days of our actual meetings, I go through the things I am scared of when it comes to dating or relationships...being tamed, domesticated, vulnerable, monogamy.”  This to me is your grief like the portcullis to your fortress.  You list states of being as if it is fear of vulnerability to love itself which permeates from your grief.  

I cannot decipher or know its origin, but I could see it like an inflated beach ball attempted to be held below the water’s surface.  I felt like in either the page or my face you were constantly reading me like I saw your secrets and both wanted to pull me in and push me away.  I thought you did not and did like it; like you wrestled in binds to admit want or need.  

Want for me or want of freedom from this piece of your soul, I thought maybe they were the same taboo; as if the act of pursing intimacy was to stir a beast within; to conduct a battle and risk attempting escape or better put allowing in a foreigner.  The grief was like a pertinacious resistance to open.  The being trapped was an obligation not to meet the standards of another, but to your conceptual commitment to the idea of caring and lifting the gate for another.  Like the intention would be a lit fire the prison guards could detect, the entering party may depart and leave you for the aftermath.

I took it as you stated, you were beginning to have feelings and care for me, not as love, just an inception.  As sudden departures painted in silence trigger powerful reactions in me based on my past, maybe so does the threat on your freedom of caring for someone trigger your grief.  

I cannot fathom you throwing a pronouncement of feelings munificently.  Pensive is your default out of costume.  In your true nudity the energy required from such eruptions appeared to me to condense suns fusing iron syllables.  The simple idea of admitting you were starting to care, I imagined took a lot for you to take that leap.  I imagine if you were not beginning to sense the uniqueness of the dynamic present you would have just played with me, never mentioned feelings, and known I was so far off the mark with the puzzle you prepare for men and women.  

Your being bellows, “You will never catch me.  You cannot touch.  If I like you I will barely speak.  You will never see me, but if you did I would never tell, I will hurt you and I cannot stop.  My heart is a paradox; the more I want, the more I pull away to preserve my shelter.  The more indifferent or disinclined the more stagename was born to laugh, smile, and tease.”  

I saw complexity, power, creativity, pathos, intelligence, and an internal world too vivid to ride shotgun.  I pictured you driving off a cliff on fire daring the mustang to grow wings, not screaming or with a middle finger, but with a small smirk, thinking, “Fuck ‘em, I lived my way.”  Inside maybe you are laughing, crying, numb, thinking about glue guns, I don’t know, but in my internal picture you are leaping off that damn cliff and privately using your brain.  

I see the grief in you from this distance like a canceled departure on that train.  I see the track.  I see the cars.  I see this ticket in my hand torn to shreds.  I watch God’s tongue roll sunsets into the horizon like a lash at my impudence to believe in what I saw, as if the train was ever there.  

In my poetry my thoughts went to your father, because I could tell you really care about him in the way you brought him up so often in the few things you did say and in contrast some of the things you said about your mother and your stepfather.  I have no way to know if your love for your father prevents you from expressing and entertaining love in your life with people who want to share emotional intimacy and care about you, but I could tell you miss him a great deal.  

I thought maybe he was the man you were closest with on Earth.  Maybe your father was the one person who you loved with your whole heart.  Maybe it hurts too much to let anyone in who could make you hurt uncontrolled like that again.  In losing him becoming vulnerable to another man may bring it back and risk too much.  I don’t know, I just could tell you loved him a lot. 

I would think it only natural that if one loves someone ever so and they depart so prematurely that one risks becoming hesitant to forge such bonds given the frailty of flesh.  I took deepest empathetic consideration of the circumstantial confluence of your friend’s passing with his in the timing of your departure, but I felt it was a measure of what men are to you through the lens and compass your father gifted you from which I took greatest navigation. 

I know what it means to be a father, to look into my daughter’s eyes and say, “I need you to be brave like daddy now.”  She needs me as a rock.  I am her compass to the world of men.  I know what it means to say, “I will always love you, but I cannot always be with you.  So I will teach you what you need to survive when I am not there, but know daddy always love you.  You are always in his heart.”  

I remember putting penguins in her hair for her pigtails at four years old never having done so because her mother always did.  I felt like I had conquered the atom balancing the symmetry of those strands.  I taught her to ride a two-wheeler, letting go of that seat pedaling to balancing freedom.  I took her to her first punk show and jazz fest.  I taught her how to dig in the Earth.  

I remember rocking weeping-her in my lap unable to explain why her life was the way it was.  My ears trained to wake from deep sleep to bolt to her bedside in response to her night terrors.  “It’s only a dream sweetheart.”  I would make up songs to sing her to sleep some nights.  

In these years we have made costumes, read Narnia to Potter, planted gardens, moved seven about to be eight times, I know how important it is for me to show her what manhood is and what that means to her. 

The relationship you have with your father is the most powerful relationship you detailed to me.  I imagined there were other family members who assisted in the formation of your passions.  In Algiers you mentioned your grandmother.  You also told me you think you were in love once.  

I assume that was your husband and the complete void of any detail leads me to see your father and this man as protagonists in the story of why you came before me in my living room, my arm around your ankle giving me that quiet almost blank face and feeling such joy permeating out of you that I felt like my soul leaped, yet there is this part of you sequestered.  

I felt when you looked back at me I saw a soul burrowing, calculating, and analyzing what I was expressing.  I felt you rip me apart, half wanting me, half wary of what I represented.  I think I just misread everything.  

I take an odd approach to the world.  I took you a good kind of odd, beautiful, frightening odd.  I feel arrogant, anarchistic, idiotic, and Sisyphean in writing.  I felt connected in a core way that I attempted to detail in ineffectual words like waves upon Gibraltar as I bash my head against the rocks here.  

I was not asking the mermaid to grow legs.  I was trying to tell her I have fins and already live underwater.  I wanted to dive down.  Either you saw that and knew this could be different and that startled you or I was a fool flopping in the tide bartering with the moon. 

To open to converse from my poetic till was evisceration.  I am spent.  My waters verbose, yours succinct, each were deep.  I felt not like an oyster knife, but as moonlight gliding tide to soft light for you to display your pearl.  

I felt like you did want a deep form of intimacy, but you know how your heart has operated in the past and maybe you think it impossible based on your choices and experiences.  Maybe I am still the hopeless romantic batting cynicism believing you wanted to open far more than the hem’s you stitched in your shrouded wrap allowed.  I wanted you to wriggle like a bog wet cat violently perturbed that your dormant heart would pump vibrantly under the tongue of mother Earth licking your wounds.  The devils on your spine would be quaked free by the power of choice to end their occupation and live a life on-the-in the way you do on-the-out.

I felt like we met, you saw who I was, thought this man has a mind and a spirit unlike almost anyone I have ever met.  I felt like you were not sure how to respond or what to say or how the hell I was doing what I was doing.  

You did that quiet thing you do at that house-show in Algiers standing up and on the deck drinking beer.  You let those little pieces out here and there.  I sensed conversation in your head of absorbing and processing.  Your eye contact pulls away.  Every once in a while maybe you thought, “I’ll let this slip, it’s ok if I just let this marble out; I am not going too far.  This can’t be real so it doesn’t matter.”  

Every date we had you added fragments.  You seemed very measured in what you emitted.  I felt like that exposure was not common, like you just do not talk about those personal parts very much.  Like you keep your worlds somewhat separate.  It made me feel special; it made me want to remember everything you said and that we did.  

Your internal iceberg is what pushed me to write those poems.  I felt like all that stuff was going on in you.  I felt like there is no way normal people date like that.  The intensity would blow the average person’s head apart.  

That cinematic series of metaphorical scenes to display the evening to the reader is not my normal writing style.  I never felt that alive with another person capable of creating it with me.  To regular people it would be like playing a song in a frequency only whales could hear or a spectrum only cats could see in the darkness.  If I wrote something like that I would never share it because I would expect to be stared at with a bad kind of blank face, not what I thought was your good interested, yes-I-understand and I am analyzing all of it blank face.  Maybe you were just playing along, I don’t know. 

There is no way I can fathom that would feel so real to me and you did not want your emotions involved.  I feel like they were involved on maybe an unprecedented level in your recent history and your grief sabotaged it when you felt you had gone too far.  

Maybe you convinced yourself you are not capable of allowing feelings to change you.  Feelings may be like a shrinking room.  Maybe you have been in lagoons of feelings before and it did not leave you in pleasantness.  So you knocked it all over.  You needed to create time for yourself.  

Maybe you smelling my emotional capability to work with you through that scared you most of all; it tasted too much like hope the sky would not get smaller, maybe you could still breathe this time.  You might want to speak to my heart, you might want me to keep speaking back, and you might want to tell your grief to get out of your life.  

Maybe that equated to pressure, too much, too quickly.  You might actually want to change, but how do you catch your breath to even utter those words aloft in your space, let alone to your public sphere?  Maybe love is that important to Luna whether you are able to admit it publicly or not.  I don’t think you would listen to singers like Antony and inspire that poetry from my heart if it was not.  

You know people pray about things.  They say God when is this going to pass?  When is the sky going to part?  Who is my person?  Why did all this stuff happen?  Why can’t I pull out these thorns?  When will I fly with both wings?  Is this the rapture of my life?  Those are some of the questions you intersecting with my life made me ask.  I thought maybe, just maybe questions like those crossed your mind too.  I was so happy thinking how big your imperfect soul might be. 

To engage a poet in such flirtations is to tango with love’s aroma.  We are not surface creatures.  I am nothing if not one of love’s orators championing the flawed pathos, the broken, the universal, the unconditional, the whole, the spiritual, the grief, the sweat and tears of God’s divinity teetering towards the ecstasy of the axioms of the personal.  I love in all forms our lives are intended to experience, all except perfect.  Perfect ends the human course; perfect is for after.  

Mistakes, perspiration, insanity, glee make an ecumenical love completing the universe like a circuit with our spirit.  If me writing to you because I feel part of that electricity makes me Epictetus’ fool, then damn me.  Damn me to the place that makes a man bleed to know he is but alive.  I do not know why you feel you are on this Earth, but that is why I feel I am here, to love that way gigantic disastrous imaginative perspiring angry torrid cataclysmic love.  

Maybe you do not want a rabid love; you prefer alone or the muted, clean, a physical zombie Budweiser to shotgun weeks of novel pheromones and mute the internal to a hum.  Maybe temporal relationships are the only ones your grief or your preference will allow.  Feelings don’t ever get involved.  When I think that it just does not fit the music or the woman you showed me.  

You might need that structurally to preserve your freedom, but your aroma is the tumultuous sweaty complex bouquet of love.  Maybe your pheromones bead differently in the glands of other men.  To me you were coated in the deep a thousand leagues at your root aching on the level of soul both wanting and afraid to be touched there hungering for the rawness.  

Maybe the intimate contact is both the most sensitive of organs elevating into the pulsing ecstasy at the zenith of what your being was born to be and exploding in the fury of an over-stimulated scar lashing out before exposing too much of herself.  My spirit thinks you want intimate quite dearly or your soul would not have betrayed your silence by speaking to me in such honest indirect emissions.  My head tells me I am an idiot making far too many inferences.  

I am an old fashioned stiff bourbon dancing passion like a carnival knife hurler who was asking you to stand across the stage.  My words were thrusting blades a quarter inch from your ear rattling body parts.  I know it was too much, but I wanted you to press heel to toe, grasp a hilt and fling a dagger through my breast plate, ribs split, heart affixed to the tip pumping metal to feel the exchange.  I did not want stagename to throw a blade as a taunt; I wanted Luna to cut me because she wanted to break into me like a freight train. 

I pursue fierce, intimate, and full.  I hunt; I play; I screw up; I revel; I die; I birth; I pound the mattress and my spirit testing the limits of what being human means.  I am imperfect and guided by a poet’s passionate soul.  I am not a Hallmark card with something cute or a fraternity boy with his hands in his pants mouthing footballs.  I paint in language, physics, economics, the kinesthetic, psychology, politics, philosophy, mathematics, sex, spirituality, blood, and poetry to drink the human experience.  I am all of these things, but at my core I am the poet whose passion sometimes betters his restraint hungering for a muse.  

I am not caught in nets of definition; there is no one road for love.  I want to lick every flavor of imperfect mess, bathe in the nectar of God and ask, “Is this all you have for me life?  Did I carve to the marrow lose everything and rise from the mat again and again and again, never losing focus on why I am here no matter how much it hurts?”  

Maybe you realized what type of animal I am and you decided I was wrong for you or you would not ever let yourself go that deep.  You could not expose that much, your grief too strong and you knew you had to move on, but do not confuse the passion I fuel my life with a snare.  This passion guides my life and is how I live whether I met you or not.  Maybe you just were not interested; I felt like there was so much more going on, I felt joy and I feel so stupid. 

At times I am a man surfing whimsy.  I ride bold waves guided by my spiritual center.  I trust my deep.  I write like this.  I balance in my accountancy, but what I offered you came from my passion, my maelstrom hurricane-eye core.

I thought you a knife thrower.  I thought you game for spelunking.  I thought you for a rainbow.  You smelled the personal in my poetry and the feline in you arched her back in titillated arousal and alarm.  I heard a god damn aria.  To see your pivot leads me to this notion of grief. 

I view life with an odd lens which is hyper-aware of nuance, emotions, sentiment, the internal of others, and how the world appears to fit together.  I often question how accurate my vision is.  With you I saw aspects of this universe in a human I never thought I would get to see.  

I felt you saw me in your vantage as a man you knew may be able to balance your complex seesaw.  To have you come into my life when and as you did and leave without acknowledging that the weight of what I felt present was even there as a potential equilibrium of compatibility makes me feel dejected, foolish, and blind.  

I would not write these things if you did not matter; if I did not see the fork in the road of my life worth splaying my body to the rack to ask your naked horse to entertain running alongside.  I know you are a being that needs the timescale of the redwood.  Like a cramped muscle needing to release after spasm such confrontation requires blood to re-flush tissue to permit movement.  How I wished I could believe such yearnings spiraled in you to run with me and it was a function of the clock rather than the hallucination of my hope.  

Part of me sees the universe in your abstruse big fat heart and I wanted to one day smash mine into yours and explode galaxies to see what happens.  I wanted to risk that divine Antony sings.  It may never be with you.  For me, my heart, maybe not yours, but for mine your strange dangerous quiet giant gorgeous supernova heart felt kindred and equally as rare.  

Maybe you just listen to those types of songs for less personal reasons.  When I hear a soul sing like that it resonates with what my heart aspires to achieve within my lifetime to be that raw, to bear that courage, to roar that powerfully soft, and to claw through the plastic muck of the commercial moor.  When anomaly opportunities like this arise I have to risk and embrace faith.  When you made a point in one of the last phone calls to bring up the Bill Callahan For A Rainbow song I took that as a measure of a pool your mind was wading through when thinking about what conversing with me links to in your mind and you wanted me to see that pool. 

I thought there was so much in there, but you barely said anything.  It was all in my head reading that iceberg I tried to describe.  I read your quiet looks.  I read your silence.  I figured you were a psychologist and you sat in front of clients never talking about yourself, just listening.  I thought you found that stance natural.  I got it so wrong.  

I have known grief and sorrow.  In my experience it does not matter what anyone says.  I had to get through the place I was in on my own terms.  I had to find my rainbow within me.  It was not easy; grief tries to resurface, but I am happy to be threw it.  I got here with inner confrontation and owning who I choose to be.  I cycled through that Kubler-Ross model. 

I have what I often consider to be a poet’s photographic emotional memory.  How I felt is really hard for me to forget.  So is how I thought someone else felt.  That is part of why me so poorly reading what was going on in your head causes such a reaction. 

I told you some of the things about myself as a manner of empathy.  I divulged some sub-headers of my past to convey I know the limits a heart can be tested because of what you said at the top of the stairs about growing up being rough and the grief I sensed throughout our encounters.  I have been through some tough shit too.  I am not afraid of someone who has experienced darkness.  I am afraid of someone that cannot understand darkness, who could not empathize with mine and see the beauty in darkness. 

I know a lot of people go through rough sections of their road and each processes in their manner.  I feel into the depths of my soul as an artist in layered deliberation and perseverance.  I saw a similar strength in you and I think that is a large reason why I feel grief is at the root.  

You do not appear to be a fearful person by nature.  I see you as quite emotionally brave.  You probably have been asked to take on a lot, to experience a greater spectrum of life’s offerings those sitting on the sidelines do not have to partake.  I know the hardest parts of my life I never planned.  Shit happens and how we respond defines us.    

Before now I would not utter the word grief, for I felt the presumption too great.  I felt maybe you would have a breaking point of release where you would see my suffering and potentially illuminate your own and approach me in soft humanity.  I prayed in my meditations that if this were to ever be it would be because you saw something beautiful in my spirit that you hunger for in your life.  I know now that will not be.  However grief is the nucleus around which the accretion of my thoughts of you congregated to try to understand your behavior. 

You told me you were scary, scared, and needed to go slow, well me too. You are deeply emotional, complex, with a huge world inside your thoughts.  Emotions were in every chair. 

Soon after you wrote you were starting to have feelings for me inside I jumped off a cliff trying to touch a comet.  Only as soon as I jumped you were completely gone.  I never saw you again.  The leap was not to logistics, but vulnerability to care for you.  When you sent your next email, I was like a tabby in the middle of the road, ran straight over, fur and guts smeared.  

You really have no idea what it took for me to open up to you the way I did.  The aftermath to your email was like ready expressive water busting a pipeline.  I know my last email divulged some narrative pieces of my life, but that was a few sentences in a Dostoyevsky novel.  

If what you felt for me sits in winter’s soil like an un-germinated seed for never or the proper season, only you will decide if you will ever examine it again.  Your volition will move the angle of the Earth towards or away from the sun to breathe life into its stored instructions.