Luna,
I was parked and saw a
woman walking her dog that reminded me of you.
She was shirted in yellow with sunglasses and her hair in a long single
black braid. Like a flash thoughts that
made this letter surfaced in an uncomfortable blur. I wrote most of this then and set the pages
aside. I picked it back up over the
course of a few months from time to time, added, edited, and subtracted. I contemplated previous letters. I felt how much of that was still in me in
various swirls, pondered why and the tick tock chagrin.
I oscillated between
my inner romantic and delusional idiot, probably the same guy. Frankly the idea that I still had so many
words surprised me, scared me, and shook my heart. Rereading it felt like a Jackson Pollock glob
of splatter maybe nonsense, beautiful, horrid, chaotic, the whole god damn
universe flushed with human color in contact lens solution. It made me a mix of sadness, fear, hope,
affection, introspection, and closure. I
figured trust the universe like the living metaphor felt like the appropriate
clock to have whatever needed to flow into my being and bring resolution to be
what it needs to be.
There was an
embarrassing dead end recycle that hurt that I do not wish to return to feeling
like a flipped over turtle. I thought
maybe writing would help resolution, to cement why I wrote any of it to you, to
be naked so unrecoverable-honest that I would never want to look at this place
again or if I did I knew how bare I was, had been. I wanted to embrace layers of words like an
inverse form of shameless nudity like viewing a body eyeball to pore, but
seeing all the pores at once in gruesome broad magnification. The analogies might rust, the taste sour, the
bottomless bin of words find floor. I
could express an apology about certain things to try to make right even if only
within myself and express other honesties as a measure of bare humanity in
testament to my experiences with a sincere intention of kindness.
Like a bolt of
lightning of a leashed dog on a sidewalk stuff bubbled up. I thought about how personal all of this was
for me. In these echoes I realize I care
that you know why this was so real for me. I will regret maybe my entire life if I did
not do justice to explaining those reasons to myself on the page and possibly
to share that with you on a level commensurate with the details in which I felt
and saw this experience because you probably deserve to know. I care to expend that effort, to risk being
judged in why I would invest such efforts knowing I know.
Given how real being
around you was for me, the chaos, the confusion, the breadth of considerations I
know this is the same vein that makes a man render his being bare on the
possibility of what love is. That scarce
potential is the only fulcrum that could make me lose such control, bow to the
chaos and so foolishly lose instinct to protect myself and eschew appearances. What was registering in your being was
independent; I have no control over that and have never sought such, but I do
think you deserve to know the depths of why I feel what I do and what my
experience concerning our dynamic was and has been.
I am tangled fishing
line of prolix words with a circus tent of emotions, thoughts, and feelings
pent in a thimble. This experience with
you is a microcosm of my attempt at the standard human condition. I am too
much. Too much for my head, too much to
allow any woman to wrap her arms or ventricles around me and have me feel held
or seen or to offer her permission to love me without me flinching like her
fingers were switchblades ready to swap positions.
There is a clockwork
in me that wants you to see my heart, how it operates, the engineering, the
phoenix feathers and ash smudged as the grease for the wheels, the numbers over
time, no faster or slower, just the speed of this measure, the way of is, in this
moment, however you got to this moment to your eyes on these characters
breathing in how you got to here in this exactness and me to present human words
unbridled mustang words laying bareback, in this moment I want you to see me.
People stare at each
other for a while like two parts of the same whole then we shift. We shift altered as a factor of intensity of
what the universe is, not necessarily the human conception of time. Some thirty seconds are more meaningful than
five years. It is / can be hilarious and
heartbreaking to try to explain that to one’s self, another, or the sky in a
relative boundless universe that from wherever one looks out it creates the
illusion that one appears to be at the center.
This can drive a whirlwind mind.
We all have our ways to try to make sense of what goes on in any of our
heads. I am sharing these words with you
point blank because you affected me. I
did some things I regret. I experienced
some things I do not understand. I
accept some things that were hard to accept, but you affected me in a chasm.
This letter is the
bravery to ask for help in the form of listening for the sake that those
moments of listening exist. This letter
is asking for a form of kindness in inbent fractals of connection not of logic,
but of the human heart.
Need can be abhorrent
repellent to our sense of being taken advantage, to imbibe the burden of
another’s lack of self-sufficiency. At
worst need is someone else attempting to commandeer volition. Need in rawest beautiful ugly is someone else
choosing to say to us, “You are mandatory.
I need you. If you choose otherwise
in the future there are consequences. I
will suffer the desolation of a human heart.
May compassion find your lips.” A
machine of innards will not function because need created a gap that leaves a
body facial cheek flush to a floor board staring at a wall of puddle-tears
gurgling where to go next because life happened. Need is gorgeous in unearthing interdependence. Need is fundamental to traverse certain paths
of living-experience, but this was and is not need.
I would rather burn
these thoughts out like a meteor glowing in atoms than float like an asteroid
in the empty space of my head. Give me
ash, flecks burnt and used in this short-short life, than complacent dust
clinging to the illusion of bone, time, and the blasphemy that we are only
these tangible-definitive skeletons huddling to fit in, to speak sensibly, to
rot stifled waiting for the desert to claim the jungle. I would prefer to give you and me my words
humble, flawed, bleeding, glowing, honest as the glint of the sun’s blade cuts,
knowing I burned for what felt worthy of the fire.
In those words there
was my want to explore submitting to vulnerable love. When I looked at you I saw a real possibility
that I had not felt in years. I felt the
possibility that given time I probably could have fallen in love with you. I can try to deny that, fight it, but in my
gut when the water’s surface stills from the chaos that recognition is the
placid mirror of what this was for me.
The wanting to know where that might have gone and why what happened
inside each of our person’s occurred is that fire burning out as this letter collides
with an atmosphere of hours.
First I want to say,
you touched my heart in an almost inexplicable flash. You truly did as one human being to
another. I am not sure what words to use
to try to express all I hope to be able to convey in this written endeavor, but
if nothing else please know that. Know
that this sentiment comes not from your direct offerings. The brevity of our interaction and your
elections truncated that avenue from development. The sentiment comes from me feeling like I
saw you. I feel like I saw you as a
person, deep inside in a rare way, which touched me like seeing a Johannes
Vermeer, a Jean-Auguste Dominique, or an Egon Schiele. You were the seed of a
star of a woman who resonated in ways that set me to evaluate my entire path
into intersecting with her on a profound level.
You left a poet with a ghost in his heart interpreting constellations.
If you do go ahead and
read this in those moments when you may want to strangle me or ponder my
sanity, perhaps mock, a good guffaw would be nice, know that I know how strange
it is, know I ponder clinical assessment versus a vibe of the flowing universe
and dare trickle something like what love looks like through a telescope. I threw pride out the window a long time ago
with you. In other words I would expect
you to laugh, be a tad creeped out, pensive in flecks, taste a poetic fire that
was once on your tongue, but ultimately swallow cleared air, that this is not a
rescue attempt or a bay of pigs, but a human being putting a course into a
moment on a platter. To him it does not
matter what you do with it; he needed to plate those bones of meat and roasted
figs to be where he needed to be only wanting you to have the same freedom for
whatever is best for you.
It’s a poet’s heart,
you touched it, what else can I say. I
am a horrible romantic, smitten and stung, harmless, but serious in that you
triggered something unbearably quixotic haunting me in the most lovely and wrenching
way that is not love, but like a lit fire in a darkened place where what I saw
before extinguished flashes like an indelible eidetic photograph.
It is something I no
longer feel in the same piquant vibration, but like an open doorway I peered into;
you opened it like a sunrise to a horizon atrophied legs were encouraged to
reactivate toes. I feel like I saw you
through that door. I see the intricacies
of the woman I saw in there, the potential; the cosmos of who I felt like you
are clouding who you actually are wishing we had the time and you the desire to
provide clarity to that disparity. I do
this knowing doing so would more likely dissipate my interest than affirm the
potential anomaly given the precarious nature of imagination and the mechanical
sterility that catapults love right out of the sane. Love is empowered by jettisoning the logical
for the quixotic to dare drowning over breathing; to lay some measure of one’s
lungs in the water and whisper-evolve, “Let us grow gills together.”
I am writing this for
many reasons, but one is to try to ascertain how accurate the picture I
perceived was and another is what to do with the potential I felt when
reflecting on how the woman you really are might have ever interfaced with me
despite knowing how impertinent such an understanding is.
After I got to know
you a bit I felt more natural chemistry and potential with you than anyone I
have met in fifteen years. There is no
getting around that in my being. It yanks
at my heart that you ran off so abruptly and that chemistry was not
mutual. That is life; it sucked to not
know what might have been, to feel so preemptively judged. The internal journey it took to be open to
that emotional connection was significant in a way which I would like to do
justice to explain in this letter.
You told me once
everybody has their path, their rough in what I imagined was an attempt to
downplay what you had just released to the air between us like a prologue to
sentences you were not sure if you could or would ever continue divulging. You have yours; I have mine.
In the gravity of what
I thought you may have been communicating in that aperture I saw a mirror that
made me hope we might be able to see/ did see each other through intimate lenses
like keyholes to something we each have held for some long measure of
years. Maybe we would really open doors
at some point; I did not know. Why your
life and my life led to that moment of you saying, “I am going to be vulnerable
now,” me witnessing so close to your body, I don’t know what that was for
you. For me given what I had shared with
you and led to and surrounded that night, I take those type of moments as beyond
me, beyond you, as if nothing else to pay attention. The universe is only that limpid in rare
remarkable flashes.
I
got vulnerable and felt rawness and power in the nudity. I began to hope quietly inside against my instincts. It took me an exceptionally long time for how
briefly I knew you to extinguish that hope.
That hope was reactionary in nature, a seed of rare season. That hope comes from a confluence of the
universe, what I detect in the air, in the motion of events, of me letting go
of me, letting life be and what I feel my path is presenting. That hope was about reconsideration of who I
am, of what is possible, of what the universe is, of who is out there, and how
deeply I could be brought to the pith of my being in certain moments that could
gush words like an exploding aquifer flowing human both in fuel and
darkness. The plants grown from seeds
from hope like that can be all sorts of organisms. Sometimes that is romantic, others spiritual,
emotional, comradery, a shared vision; it is a heterogeneous garden.
I exposed too much in
your exit, flopped around like a salmon at the end of the run, chunks globing
out my flesh. I imagine it freaked you
out a bit. I tried to self-destruct in
my way, at times I was far too childish.
I pondered with your profession and your tradition of self-distancing
that my attempts to communicate past the line of your declination cast me into
a lot where you probably would never talk to me again.
I was like a pair of
sunglasses fallen into a paint can inexorably tainted. Even if you were conflicted about those polarized
lenses there was no trying those on again.
Those were landfill frames. I see
a tripped man, torn trousers, rubbing his jaw blearing into the hangover of snippets
and all I want right now is water. I
just want a glass of water, and me offering you this letter is that crystal
drink. All I can give you in return is
an apology and bare an emotional nudity so striking that I have given you a
reciprocal vulnerability for you to imbibe or not as you will.
In processing your
exit my heart wanted to feel, my brain wanted to wall that off, obliterate
feeling in a flood of words, drown the pipe flowing the wanting of a connection
for an idea of hope that polluted the quiet sanctity of my alone. I was good with my alone. I did not plan on altering that. I am a god damn eagle scout merit-badge fiend
at being alone.
I meet you and you’re
you and you feel like an alien like you’re from whatever home planet I really
came from, almost like a female version of me.
My lungs hurt and heart shakes and I stare into the stillness of your
pulse like a blue star off in the approaching distance and I am scared as hell,
but I was always calm around you.
Being around you put
me at peace. In the silence kissing you
was like a canvas of clarity and creation.
I appreciate silence it allows flowering plants of the mind to
produce. I like quiet people. I liked you.
Inside in our cores that is what jarred me, not what I felt for you, but
what I felt we might be able to unlock in each other if we surrendered our
guards.
I need certain
hermetic things for my art. There is
this whole list of traditional social conventions I do not wish to
participate. It’s a mess. I know it is sandcastles awaiting the tide
for a mermaid leagues underwater.
You were like a god
damn buzz-saw. I reacted to open for you
as this anomaly saffron crocus beckoning me to smell. Maybe you felt stuff; that was yours to
express. You kind of did in the same breath
you rushed out the door; you never looked at me again after sharing that. I figured you are on your journey and the
phase you were in facing the feelings you were beginning to have about me you
felt a need to create space between you expanding a burgeoning nucleus of
emotion that in your phase felt claustrophobic, not from my intrusion but your
own catalyst for change like a new plant in your garden you felt the need to
rip out before the roots spread to commandeer space you felt was finite. Inside that garden I saw a woman who values
love highly like ambrosia itself, but so wary like poison and wine in two
identical bottles knowing what it is to sip from the wrong glass lip or worse
the cynic of no matter the chemical composition the liquid inevitably spoils
into a toxic draught.
I compounded
everything into such a train wreck in my writing of fractured elbows and
backwards kneecaps. Some part of me
wanted forgiveness from you in an expression of empathy for my position as if
you had complicated feelings before in your life walled in such a corner, as if
you could understand the layers of the paint on those sunglasses. I felt like you could be compassionate and look
at a hundred year old wallflower and see the brush stroked petals, seasons of human,
the wall cracks, winter.
I saw how powerful you
are underneath your walls. My god do you
have walls, but I felt like beyond those barriers was this swirling whirlwind
of emotional expression. It came out in
your dancing, costumes, and psychological analysis. You contemplate. You assess.
You do this on yourself, but you appear to keep it to yourself. Your independent mind appears to have a
stalwart vigilance against ever being told what to do or showing her hand with
a Gurley Brown her-way panache.
Never receiving empathy
or detail of your internal calculus leaking vulnerability came across as an
unnecessary lack of closure that hurt. I
felt dehumanized. That lack of closure
took my ability to hold the happy window your presence in my life brought me to
be remembered without the clouded taint of uncertainty and salted earth your
silence sowed. I needed to look you in
the eyes and say goodbye.
We all want to say, “I
am invincible; I am secure, if I like you I can turn that off like an electric
nose hair trimmer with a slide of the finger.
No, I don’t have to shave hairs in extraneous crevices of my person; why
would I own one of those? I wake up
gorgeously handsome impervious to circumspection over what anyone thinks of
me.”
“I have no
embarrassing urge to ride the self-loathing short-bus. There is no revving engine of woe left idling
in the parking lot; no high school callow dejection, no sardonic college kid
romance retort of ‘take-care,’ no mordant adult sharp wit reply, no shtick or
wizened mortality reflection grayed-out heart, Nah, in fact I am fine. I’m good.”
We all want to be the
one who needs less. Cynicism has damn
near eaten romance to death. Between
television, movies, and internet phones the sense of real face-to-face actual
romance is Dracula-like myth where maybe there is some subverted lust to be
intimately pierced, but deep down most people are scared of being slit, bled
out with nothing left, because they gave their heart to another and they’ve
seen it before. They’ve done it, been broken
and cut and who wants that? Maybe it was
a parent, a friend, a lover, but everybody has given up the goods and lost at
some point.
Who wants to actually
open up to fall in love, because we all know how it ends. We live in this postmodernist anachronistic
time-hole reversed and transposed where hundreds of years ago poetry and love
could take the humble stage with sonnets and real letters sent over oceans or
borders. There was the patience for
wooing, ink to dry, and anticipation, but we regressed. We’re better at deflating the patriarchal
bullshit aspects, but Rumi got roofied by what’s your angle and where’s the
con.
The performance level
of what love is has become homogenized into a farcical pantomime of life from
reality shows to discus-throwing displays of prowess where maybe in the
eighties it was trying to fit in the group, then everybody wanted to be
special, be unique and stand out but still be included in this paradoxical
elastic band. Now kids grow up with cell
phones fused to the umbilical. Twelve-year-old’s
find red-tubed subways to porn candy-lands and are prompting sexting and oral,
not as if the biological interface was novel, but the idea of subtext and
internal shadows is mauled like a rampaging hump-twerk Jessica Miley-Cyrus
Rabbit of body image and plasticity that penis bench press and mammary
elliptical machines are the eighth grade gym class, but with an audience. The internet sock-hop is a giant social media
entourage of performance art absent the avant-garde, because it has all been
done and we’re throbbing for a place to be, to be ourselves whoever that is or
somebody else an image or a collaboration, but included in some registering
pulse.
We grow up splintered
and accessed, alienated and altered in these bent card board boxes of cereal
where the tab is torn or the angles get akimbo where the next time somebody
tries to open the box it doesn’t fold or unfold the way the geometry was
designed. The bag gets crumpled and torn
fibers of sealant fend off intruders looking for grains and sugar to pair with
their milk and the contents spill over the counter because the container is
untenable.
We want people to like
us, but we don’t want to be placed in the same egg carton. None of our boxes make it past sophomore year
without a rip or an ad campaign, even if it is not sex we are either eating
ourselves or offering samples that shoppers decline or gorge beyond what we’d
prefer. The whole charade leaves us shaken
and desperate for clues on how the damn grocery store works. We want this fortitude and independence,
secure in the grand parade that other people want to be like us, but we want to
be indecipherable, un-copy-able, yet ineluctably attractive when convenient.
The cynicism comes out
of that because we learn to chase these images of who any one is. We all hide.
Even me in all my bullshit, I am hiding.
I am hiding behind a junk yard of words right now in this unmanageable
paragraph. I am horrible at letting
anybody close or acknowledge they see me or know me or have permission to say
you get me. Fuck I am untouchable over
here and when I hurt, I will tell you I am hurt, but I will ramble unendingly
to explain, because the simple yeah you understand what I felt or what I
experienced rarely works or applies with my special ass. Nah, none of us are that special. We are all in the same parade trying, just
trying to feel like there is a damn place to go. That the parade isn’t just some stupid hoax
circle looping us round and round until the feckless march swallows us into
oblivion.
Some people they give
up. They quit trying on romance or love
or connecting exposed. Romance gets
shelved and hollowed out as just another one of the millionteenth commercial
products trying to con us into some rapacious land grab for the little we feel
inside, like our love is only there to be taken advantage of rather than grow
something. The ego-machine sells the
true love is forever virgin-birther-like tripe as if longevity or novelty is a
function of value. We are so god damn
afraid of getting it wrong we freeze.
We start on this
amphetaminic rush from teenage years to grab bodies to experiment with how love
works, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual; let me try this, no that, oh
good god how does anybody deal with this?
Then we barter our minds silly in some monogamy mythical Indiana Jones
Last Crusade cup selection as if we have chosen wisely like the any of the top
thousand matches for us have ever even crossed our path to be an option to be
sipped in that room. As if we are
supposed to drink one cup for life, pfff.
Maybe if you grow independently and together in some kind of tenacious
wild forest knowing seasons happen and in them most likely you will separate
find growth and it is the most natural repressed function of life to grow,
evolve, yet we unnecessarily punish ourselves afraid to splash in the water or
spill a damn drop.
We try our best to
just be. To be around another human
being without losing our damn minds. How
can anyone be around another person that much without resenting them or over
analyzing them into birdseed to be thought about referenced in the daily comic
strip reciprocally hazed into an effigy of the characters you each were when
you “were dating” until the color fades into monochrome definition of this is
all that ever will be? You risk slipping
on the shower soap to get boring.
Then one day you are
laying on the mattress and voracious fades to desirable to tolerable to
repugnant and then you know you’ve stepped in it; you’ve lost yourself and the
ability to see the beauty in the other because you’ve sacrificed the idea of
love itself into the cult of expectation like nothing can be new again because
you forgot the one essential kernel: that life is a perpetual opportunity to
grow. What did I choose to do to grow
today? That is my daily question, how I
define success: art, learning, love, sharing, creating. When you encapsulate the errand into an
individual rather than see them as one of the many conduits, albeit maybe the
most integral to facilitate that daily human charge of augmentation unfolding,
you peter out.
Maybe that happens,
maybe it doesn’t, but it sure scares the shit out of anybody that has been
around long enough to see behind the curtain of love to know love does not have
to last forever to be love. Love is an
amorphous amorous angel with a devil’s smirk whirling in pent guts. When a person gets bitten and loves that hard
and goes through the extraction, whether it is a spoon dully badgering a will
over years or one single shocking bullet to the head love takes organs that are
not available for transplant.
What happened with you
and I was different, but it brought me to places I have been, where my deepest
insecurities dwell mainly because I thought we had a legit shot at something
real, fertile soil for wilderness. I was
at a point where I thought I was starting to have feelings for the woman I saw,
but I had no idea if my vision of who you are was accurate. I am left having no idea who you are or if I
even like you.
I know I have some
magic in me. I am a poet-dork flying tortoise. I am a thousand years old bellowing at
god. This, this meeting you, you felt
like a chimera, this blazing beast dazzling and dangerous, but magic in her
belly. I thought we could play. This was not pretend or nonchalant, but I am
a writer, a creative eight year old dreaming in his thirties and maybe
everything in here about you, this, ‘us’, is an entire figment of my
imagination churned buttermilk amusement park congealed into a soon molten city
for the rats of my dalliances to lick up like Hamelin children piped into a
cave of forget. In other words I have
little idea if any of the words in the silences I picked up on to make so much
of why I am writing this were in any way real on your end; I have no idea; all
I know is what I feel.
It is sharing a pulse
of blood through a moment with another human being and feeling it vibrate
through the room with an uncanny lack of trepidation. The beat booms without that constant
precautionary veil we all walk around with through the minutia of the
hysterical joke inside a joke it is to try to hide in plain sight from
Starbucks to the shower gel. The hiding
is exhausting and at some point it hits you to want to share with a specific
person in a specific moment. It makes
you want to cry, to just burst into tears and bellow in some ancient language
of raw and when it hits you, it’s stupefying.
I thought maybe I was
entropy to you. There was some moment at
the Vietnamese restaurant after you talked about your father, his patch with
the horse; I remember looking into your eyes something triggered silently. I knew I was interested in pursuing you after
that, I saw how beautiful you were quietly tucked away in a booth seat in that
dress spotting remnant flecks of glitter skin. I saw you underneath whatever we had been
talking about earlier, your job or your friend in that newspaper you
leafed. I started to question being
closed and tried to open.
I felt like your exit
was about you creating distance to continue to craft your life in a certain
manner and I represented change. Whether
you were going to go through change by being around me or not was not the
point, the point was that you were beginning to slip out of control of feeling
things, of potentially changing from a comfort zone and by going back to
wherever you were before you met me was a battle to avoid entropy. I ultimately feel it was not a fear of
intimacy, but your fear of commitment.
You opened up to me in
a way that felt like a natural burgeoning.
You create intimacy with your audience behind a costume and your clients
behind a professional accreditation and protocol. You appeared to be an artistic aware awakened
human cultivating intimacy orchards. At
first these looked like walls to keep intimacy out, but in reflection they
would appear to me to be you seeking intimacy like roots in ways you can imbibe
and still be you like a trunk distant from the reservoirs from which she drinks. My poetry is similar.
What you appeared to
be running away from was commitment to have anyone be in or affect you in the
personal sanctuary of intimacy you create.
No one was to need. Commitment
maybe represents a loss of control, but if you are like me the real hitch is
expectation. There is an expectation
that floats like a tiny orb of having to explain or justify or plan when a
person wants to spend too much time around me.
The orb rains a liquid urge to seclude.
I have this gargantuan
realm in my head of daily wonder and exploration and the very idea that someone
else might position between that play-land and me is, even if I care deeply
about them, is in ways a threat. I don’t
want the call for explanation of what goes on in here or why I spend my time in
here; I just want them to understand and give me plenty of space as I care
about them in my introverted way. With
your rules and carriages, I thought the control was to protect your heart, but
also from a familiar itch.
Words poured in,
things from the story of my past that I was not at a stage to share with you
surfaced. Words came from an insecure
cavity. It broke my heart because I did
see possibility, but possibility to a place so marred by what I did in trying
to get to a place to see what happened clearly after your departure.
Particles had to align
into a flash of intensity inside you to define a moment to create an aperture
to try to at least open up a cat door for me.
I am dexterous, a yogic spine, but you have to open the gate. I am no burglar. I thought that is what you were doing at the
top of the stairs, not the portcullis, but a cat door, a peak in and space for
us to be around what that felt like for a while. The courage to create moments like that
define our blip lives.
Maybe we were like two
black swans in transient migratory waters.
Maybe something inside me has always lived a circuitous path genetically
programmed like a salmon to return with some mythic creature out there where we
can actually still be in the same conversation after minute forty two in a
common origin pool. My words have long
been my death knell like a non-indigenous species to most women’s ears into
brambles and jungle rot too much to view beyond the first dune or bend in the
wood, entertaining, enthralling as a sideshow, but nobody wants to live at the
circus unless you possess a certain weirdness that is normal to you found under
the traveling tent.
I swim to learn what
it is like to be loved and share, because I know I am so god damn scared to get
what I want. I am afraid of being that
salmon getting to that spot upstream finding that release and it will god damn
kill me. I won’t know what to do or how
to be. I only know this vagabond ocean,
fish-eyed literature, and fin-ink pages and trying not to fall apart as a
father. I don’t know what it is like to
have a woman love me back, like for real love me back where she sees me plain
and doesn’t flinch. The love or the
person is not even what I want; it is the sharing the burden of seeing it,
beyond the everyday delusions so many dissuade the choice of what to reward
their attention.
The foundation of
where the dancing comes from, which I imagined went way back was at the heart
of you that girl grown into redwood owl you.
She was the real jewel I found so beautiful. She was the muse inspiring me not because she
moved, but because of the contemplation she put into the dance. I imagined her sitting on a sidewalk curb
next to me quietly staring at a blue sky, smiling turning her cheek, playing
with her braid, laughing and running off into the woods to play, curling her
index finger indicating me to follow, imagine, and create with me where the
wild things are. I felt like I saw in
you like that and cracked the egg yolk of what life is all over me muddy toes
and a spring creek bed.
You coyly smile,
demurely sniff, but never breathe too deeply in a sagacious temperament
posturing weaponry so that when you inhale love coming at you, the exhale never
offers too much of yourself when the scent begins to stir your bloom. You remain behind a line of walls like shark
teeth circling, kissing with those lovely teeth. I saw how powerful love is to you and maybe
why you keep such a respectful distance and a barbwire tongue.
That is the thorn
under the flap of heart-skin of the siren.
The siren poses lovely, sings alluring overtones. Why; why does she sing at all? Is she joyous for the feast of the sailor’s
bones? What is she wanting? Is she afraid of admitting to her playmate
sirens that her heart yearns not to be held, but to love, to express intimately
unilaterally absent compensation for what it means to transcend the reward of
adoration from blind mariners fantasizing over an illusion, but to receive the
very sanctuary her voice projects across the tides to ships? To love is to find home, not within the other,
but through the self in the presence of other to what is already within
us. Love is an open harbor to swim in,
through, out and back in as one so desires.
For a siren to love she must become vulnerable to her own song.
People are arrangements
of what the universe is. The emotions
felt and created by the arrangement held inside the person as a vessel are what
we see. The surface is pale. Humans are centrally about the energy of
their intentions and experiences. The
outside could be a reflection of or a wall to the inner emotional vortex. Everybody we could meet is so god damn bigger
on the inside. We are galaxies tucked
away behind Hanes and mascara. When I
saw you; when I saw yours floating in the silence behind your lambent eyes; it
damn near knocked me over as one of the most vivid people I have ever met.
I live in almost a
constant state of bareness with what the universe is, like I don’t have an
epidermis so that what registers with me with what goes on in a regular space
just hits me raw and I lack the paper napkin filter most people have to just
wipe the counter. Everything soaks
in. When sex gets involved that
penetration and recollection becomes exponentially magnified.
I don’t want people in
here I am not ready or willing to keep around in my spiritual
consciousness. Intense emotions for me
either positive or negative are often like tattoos. To be in that place was a muddy lotus inching
to bloom from some dark places I have trod.
Your presence in my
life was instigating bubbles below my surface.
They were not fully formed. They
never will be. It is why my
broken-water-pipe words are still so gangly; there is an unknown of never
getting started that leaves my vocabulary so unsettled, yet profuse flowing
over my dribbling fingers.
It’s like voltage; our
outlets probably had sufficient if not queer voltage to empower the innate
wires we plug into the universe through the self. I saw you behind your fabric and skin,
lipstick and books, rebellion and conformity staring like eyes linked in a
reciprocal mirage asking, “Are we each real?
Nah, it can’t be. Mirrors
lie. I’m scared of everything. I’ll fuck this up like I always do. This is fake.
S(H)e’ll run; I’ll run. It doesn’t matter.” I thought you saw me behind this
single-father dancing act, manhood accountancy, punk rebellion truth-seeker
yogi poetry of who I was founded to be at eight years old, asking what the hell
is life; what the hell is water?
I thought she’ll see
my demons and run. She’ll see how afraid
I am to ever depend on anyone, how I try to do everything myself. She’ll never believe the difference between my
trauma and my sexuality. She’ll figure
out how the word family tears my heart in confetti and makes me feel like a
bristled motorcycle rider under a pale moon humming the horizon. She’ll see how I have this itch to just be
alone. Somehow when I looked in your
eyes I thought maybe we were supposed to teach each other how to let somebody
care about us and not feel fenced.
We’re gnarled and in a
way our greatest pains are beautiful to poets; it is a way of distancing
harshness into art like sailing through a hurricane and saying I got to travel
the world with how strong that wind was that blew me off what I thought was
supposed to be my course. In a way the
poet is so overjoyed at the wonders in the monstrosities, the battles, the
artifacts and relics collected that the heinousness that sliced his cheek
becomes an extension of his Achilles-heeled smile.
When your five year
old daughter tells you in her bed after you’ve read her story that, “Mommy says
you only pretend to love me,” it does things to a man. I don’t want her to repeat the cycle of being
an abusive woman. I am very sensitive to
that idea. I do not know how much all
that affected my view of you when you related your own issues with
vulnerability, but I know to some extent it did. When you hinted at the top of the stairs at
how rough it was for you, my mind went to a lot of places to where potentially
you traveled from and what love means to me and maybe you in many different
forms.
I pondered if you had
been abused, how your parent’s marriage affected you, death, losing people, and
what might have happened in your marriage and the billion other things I do not
know about you. I only know you were
staring at the ceiling speaking, my body next to yours and I felt something
imprint on me. I could not help how much
that impacted me; it is just the way I am made I guess. It changed me. It made me feel like the universe was
vibrating through the room. I felt like
you like any of us have been hurt and hurt others, but maybe the cuts you had
to take were probably pretty bad to make you as guarded as you are. In a very real way after that moment as a man
I wanted to care for you in a way that didn’t really make sense because I didn’t
know what your words meant or how I even felt, but you imprinted something in
me that was I shudder to admit felt in its tremor divine.
I wake up to piles of
sticky notes and scribbled papers like some kind of somnambulist scribe. I am drawn to tap into the universe through
my head. My partner may be inspiration,
but she can also represent a barrier between getting words to the page, the art
made or the permeations of thought emitted.
I need to get it out. If somebody
gets between me and that, expects me to be any different and can’t find a
balance with me rather than hoping I am like some trainable dog, I am going to
run through a wall to give myself space.
I know myself well
enough to know between the books I plan to read in my lifetime, music, yoga,
art projects I have planned, books I plan to write, poetry as it happens, and
all kinds of other stuff that I do with just me that will keep me quite
occupied.
Sometimes in all the
vines and ant hills you see a person though a lightning bolt of vision, you
feel like you see them, really see them in a flash like none of the thorns or
quicksand was in between. The space separating
the chaos from the sanctuary of inside that is the circle muted the world’s
cackle to where the only sound one heard was the image of another person
staring at you for a lambently flickering sparkle. You swear you saw him or her. You saw it like a jaguar’s gaze from the
shadow knowing the beauty and the danger were right there lurking with love and
fear like a gush of saliva on an incisor for all the reasons a being wants to
bite into the flesh of another knowing the answer is all in the choice of pressure
applied, the point at which the biter does so to give pleasure or to take
pain. This is the nature of love, life
and a connection between beings. This is
the forest in which I felt like maybe we began to see each other. That line of sight was a road, a path in that
fecundity. You looked like an opening to
form a connection that registered somewhere more than I dare say, but in the
end felt like getting eaten.
The antimonies of
alone and together have long haunted me; you made me question their exclusivity
like with a woman like you I might be able to keep my alone and also be
together. That is my grail; I won’t
apologize for trying to share that cup with you. I felt your lips a similar parched appetite.
When you left the
words were right there like I had unzipped my sternum, my heart in my hand, not
to give it to you, just to show you, to show you how I had opened, what colors
swirl in there and how fucking hard that was to do for me. I didn’t know what to say, how to explain
that. Showing you any of it made me feel
guilty like an intruder, a monstrosity Quasimodo. I burrowed into my writing, because that is
my nature, my safe place where I can obfuscate in stupid big oceans of obtuse
idiot prolix words to hide some simple idea that I was hurt and sad that I was
not going to get to spend more time with a woman I had opened a door inside
for.
I saw you as strong
and dark, like maybe you have lived an experimental life of finding your path on
chainsaw roller coasters that has gone down allies and crevasses like me, maybe
not the same ones, but divorce it always has a story typically not rosewater
and untorn irises, but inky and squid-like difficult to put into words without
feeling the curves will spill misunderstandings or judgement or to take a
person’s mind to the other in a reflective cast they no longer inhabit. Maybe that leaden octopus squirming liquid
murk across these images of two people was powerless, because wherever you have
been, whatever your path, I only wanted you to be who you are. Wherever you came from I only wanted you to
be in that moment with me. For crackled
and mossed stepping stones mark a path worth traveling, a person who has sucked
the marrow of life and lived flawed and glorious.
I need no forgiveness
for my path. There is nothing wrong with
me in that regard, but there is an injury in desolation, a mathematical deficit
of touch that requires replenishment, an emotional well that has been drained
to drought. I would not be human if I
could summon a satiated throat within the confines of my waters alone in
perpetuity. The do-everything-on-his-own
man within me feels guilty for wanting, for even acknowledging that human
need. To acknowledge it is to look at my
feet and see the sands of a desert, to stare up into an enormous sun blankly,
the bubble insulation of an infinite playlist of music and library of books
gets pierced. It was a magically
terrifying kiln.
Offering you any
direct compliment seemed entirely precarious.
Telling a woman she makes you feel like she’s a masterpiece, art raw,
genuine, native what paints in your bones and she fills your head with all
sorts of what the fuck is going on moments is a recipe to be viewed as a child,
some halcyon juvenile haze of perception.
I question sometimes if romance is actually allowed to be real in the
world of jaded adults where the most common human scenario for the complimented
subconsciously reacts, “I can do better.
Let me find someone harder to get.”
Sometimes I feel as a
man venturing out into that void of poetic flirtatious offering is
intrusion. To summon the courage to
offer a sweetness is to be scalded with the glare of an agenda. Marketing begins. Convincing rears its oblong skull. Defenses alert. I am trying to forge a connection, not just
touch body parts. That gets personal and
complicated and risks slipping down a road where feelings breach and hurt
wagers in the pheromones.
A physical compliment
from a person ignorant to the internal composition of the viewed prompts an
egoistic supplement. This is
natural. I am no different. It is the nutritional value digested or the
circus acts some people indulge to trigger public accolades which bellow the
dirge of potential insecurity versus playful fun. You have your cosmetics scout badge,
cosmopolitan naturalist with mascara like Alphonse Mucha. How much of this was advertising versus art,
how much is the dance a boon to satiate the normal doubts and thirst for
reassurance in this world we all crave versus I am an artistic owl dancing for
me I have liked dressing up pretty and playing pretend since I was six or this
is a necessary parcel to the whole burlesque industry internet click-at-the-bottom-and-accept
web contract, I don’t know?
The part I usually
don’t say is, “I don’t know if I even like you.
I barely know you. I know we just
made out, but trust me I am clueless and probably will just plot in my head how
to explain to you I am such a mess to lower your expectations so you won’t want
anything to do with me. I am fighting my
instinct to just make assumptions about you that you probably want no part or
lack the internal tools to deal with the landscape on the other side of these eyeballs
and frankly if you do the urge that I will get bored, antsy, or annoyed by your
perpetual insistence on hanging around scares me I will want to bat you away
with a bookmark.” We might fool around a
little bit and I am acting and forcing myself to go through a process to make
sense of the thing for the compass needle to show up, because I am so rarely
even interested and even in the moment I am fighting the urge to run pushing
myself to engage.
At the end of the day
I just like being single. I really do. As soon as I consider letting single go I
panic and want my toy back. These past
six years have really solidified how much I enjoy the palette of freedom single
affords. To most single-dating is
transposing people; I don’t really like to date casually, at most I can bear it
for a two, maybe three different human dates and then I need a hiatus. I find it somewhat exhausting and
unrewarding, because I want a deep personal connection, but I don’t want to be
in a relationship that takes my alone time away. I want to be intimate and alone. That is a paradox that you made me consider
it was actually possible to try to pull off.
Emotionless sexual
behavior takes a spoon and scrapes my insides out and makes me feel hollow, not
because I don’t want to appear or feel like an asshole or guilty, but because
it makes me feel like a nothing, existence-less. It is not so much holding back; it is knowing
my natural language, hue of colors painted on memories and everyday experiences
that if I don’t feel like the other can read, see, or taste; I feel this
diminishing return of hanging out with a person who sees a fractional glint of
who I am and I feel alone. I feel
perversely more alone than if I were physically alone.
Sex is a major avenue
of replenishing the ink well to write the story of two, but it is the
foundation of being seen as one grows in each swirl of hours, to be witnessed
that makes life truly worth living. That
foundation is the emotional connection as people grow. The rest is fallow ground waiting for its
similar moment of cultivation, highlighting just how precious that tiny space
in the universe is two people have found in the bedlam. One can fall in love
with thousands of different people and be brought to the heavens, some are very
special fits, but no one is unique.
Uniqueness is a delusion of the ego.
But when we do fall in love it is because we have allowed ourselves to
be viewed and to see and surrendered to flow egoless into the portal of the
universe through the release of the self we perform in the presence of the
other.
I saw a depth that is
one of the most kindred feelings I have ever felt in a human being and
expressing any of that made me so conflicted, naïve, intrusive, so ridiculously
premature and unauthorized I did not want to admit that to myself. Facing that idea that yeah you might be that
different from the others, that maybe I might be that different from the others
for you; that is shut-the-door get-out frightening. I did not want to look at that in the
mirror. That’s romantic. That’s horrendously romantic.
It makes my poet-heart
smile and lose breath, gasping. It poses
purpose to fractals of moments woven in spider web experiences refracting the
light to get to this god awful pool of emotions and thoughts inescapably human
caught like water in the pocket of a sticky web in a tree branch too early in
the morning to look at in unevaporated dew.
I sit on the ground staring up at a magnifying glass of a sky-lake in an
arachnid’s snare. The sun is glaring
down through the reflective prism of that limpid liquid and I am willing to try
to peer into that bursting orb. Retinas
and lenses caught blazing because my heart knows nothing in this world is worth
a god damn thing without love, none of it.
Maybe you never wanted
that, but I have rarely felt wanted the way you made me feel in a native way
like there has been a road of your life etched out of your childhood,
adolescence, to adulthood like an undulating meandering river. In me you saw a man capable of witnessing the
curvature of that river sitting aside to you watching the current flow, feet
and buttocks pressed in the grass, chin on the tabletop of knees, arms wrapping
shins, facing outward, quietly, fetal-like and silent like we were each fifteen
years old again.
I initiating, awaiting
you to turn your neck towards me, kissing.
You peering into me like a litmus Rorschach test of a mirror reflecting
off my words, the sight of my eyes, to come to a moment of disclosing of
allowing the precursor bubble of what any form of love is made to surface. This urge in you to compress that capsule
inside to risk looking at me and not seeing these men and women of your past
like ink blots smeared across my face interpreted like some Francis Bacon
painting blur of imprint dissolving into the clarity of a photograph. You to look into a man’s eyes as you crave
intimacy with the same burning degree you detest commitment. Maybe in the clearness of those waters
washing the gaze of my face, maybe I quit looking like shackled quicksand, but
a man, just a flawed human man sitting aside you in the grass hoping he sees
you with the same lucidity like dare whisper solid ground.
Most likely that was,
is never going to be, maybe should never be, but I know what it felt like to
see you that way it does not happen often in a lifetime. I cannot dismiss expressing the depth of that
even if it comes across as weird, obtuse, stuck in a moment, saturnine loneliness,
sophomorically quixotic, a creep pop-anthem.
I accept that, because ultimately that seed of possibility represents
love, like the genetic instructions in a blueprint of evolved biology and
spirituality in the audacity of what might.
A heart takes time; it
is not a rational organ, a poet’s heart even less so when a woman puts an
escritoire the size of Italy inside him.
I want that paint off, white-washed.
In the morning I attempted
to make you breakfast. I remember waking
first wanting to hold you in the light, stopping myself consciously in a mental
partition of wanting to give myself space, give you space. I am so reluctant to express care like it is
frowned upon, like a “I know you don’t want this, but I want to offer, I want
to help.” Or a “I know you do not really
want me to be close, but I appreciate your presence.” I felt I had to get up and process my body
like you were not there, cuddling and sleeping in would seem needy, indulgent,
something personal and beautiful with emotional intimacy. I wanted to offer you a kindness at a
distance. I made you the eggs the way a
crow leaves a button on a window sill in exchange for seed from a human.
I left it downstairs,
came back up in the bed knowing I had offered you space, to get up and in way
if you wanted to just run, to hurry up and leave you could. You could escape if you had wanted. Like if you stirred more fully and saw my
body still there in the full light you wouldn’t look at me like some kind of
fungus spore germinated on a forest log in the night to be flicked off with a
gaze as if to say back away.
I remember returning
holding you briefly, softly in the sheets in that trepidation of space between
intimacy and distance afraid of moving too far to either side of that river
banking on nothing but to give us time.
I did not want to risk an emotion in me I could not control developing
to want you to stick around for a while.
I did not want to risk you pushing me away. You rose and I could not tell if you
succumbed to my offering of yolk out of happenstance hunger, courteous
mannerism, appreciation or taste for something I would not normally cook and
you would not normally eat.
I met eyes with you
and it was scary. The game was right there
pointed out. I felt like we saw each
other. I felt like you put words in my
mouth because a whispering place in you wanted to be found and a plangent place
wanted to stay alone.
You wrote about having
to prepare to be around me, like adjusting to the light, catching your breath
to not feel like you were going to be trapped.
I could feel that in you before you even wrote it, I was aware of it in
the way you looked at me in that still way, it was soft and endearing. You
made me feel like I was that magic. That
made me write letters like my god damn life is on the line to hold that magic
in my lungs and keep breathing. The whole
god damn universe is in there doe-eyed, pensive, and boggling. There is a jungle full of dancing unicorns
playing strip poker betting pages of Shakespeare in a swamp of Louisiana
irises.
This was all life is
right here spilling all over the damn place.
Not the fiddling meaningless lonely fingertip sex talk of eyeball-only
intercourse, but there, right god damn there, something neither of us asked for
or planned. That’s how the universe
comes sometimes like a continental meteor out of nowhere in bar lights and moon
shadow. That intimacy is ghastly,
because we are to trust in ourselves and the other that we know where to go
next.
It
is always the next that is horrifying, the potential cage of following
blueprint sentences. What if art
evaporates? The canyon for that dopamine
receptor doesn’t quite stretch from the biological to the spiritual. What if obligation bests desire? The mind can get lost in the haze of not
choosing anymore. Choice gets baked in with the expectation. Love becomes institutionalized. How does anyone find the bravery to be
intimate enough to risk being accepted for who and what we truly are?
Maybe love is a
volcano. We seek flames, calderas to
dive into drinking and spitting, drinking and spitting until our mouths are so
callused and blistered that we do not even taste. We eat around what looks like love like it is
toxic and mold-covered. All we have is
charcoal blackness burst with a cell-torched tongue. Who can speak or love with that? The ego consumes us as if our past is the
present. We feel like we have to swallow
a thousand days of future to just intimately kiss another human; so we
flinch.
I thought maybe the
deliberative words I sensed in you would erupt.
I thought maybe you would choose to open towards me rather than
run. I was wrong; I respect your choice,
but it hurt and it was complicated and the lack of recognition that we were
even experiencing the same rare ocean nearly drowned me as I bobbed there
treading letters staring up at your sky of silence.
I saw a dynamo blazing
librarian quirky, awkward, sophisticatedly sensitive lady grace closet dork
strapped in an armored corset and espionage lipstick. I thought about the difference between
exhibitionism and connection. I thought
about what it means to be looked at and to be seen. I thought it was a one way intimacy, an
outlet, where no one could talk back, except to cheer. Your creativity, the worlds that seed and
sprout from the gardens of your fancy and the kiln of coal-shelled diamonds that
powers the reason you started dancing in the first place can bloom and
fire. Maybe burlesque was your exhale
and psychology a form of inhalation where you help others in quieter ways.
It was like your
spirit was a cat and she brushed her back arched against my leg, hairs fluttering,
dander in my lungs, eyes peering up, tail coy.
She asked me to touch her face stroking her whiskers and I went to place
my hand to her nape to run my fingers in a semicircle at the apex of her
spine. I did for a moment and she
spooked as if I had a collar in my other hand.
Maybe you are use to
breathing almost publicly alone. With me
you were attempting to breathe with another person, in and out, a different
rhythm. Trusting when you breathed out
something would come back, the circulation would not go to hell. You had that nervous itch to stop first, to
quit the circular for the linear, to quit looking, to go back out to your
independent respiration, in with the thoughts, out with the art, calm, safe,
alone, unseen. Your phone, the stage,
maybe those are for looking and exhibitionism in a weight commensurate with
what you are shielding inside you that you do not let anybody see. I thought for a window you wanted me to see
you.
You encouraged me to
start to care about you despite warning me you were like a siren mermaid that
eats the hearts of men in her little sewing circle of pasty-making craft queens.
I saw this paradox of independence of
two people only capable of needing someone that did not need anyone. Someone that knew the stark road of
self-reliance looking at the empty pillow knowing the way it just has had to be
based on who they were born to be.
Some people get
molested or in a fight or too close to a murder or an assault or war, one
parent abuses the other, a friend gets sick or bitten by a dog or a sibling
dies or there is not enough food or homelessness or rape or drug use or any of
the unlimited fissure-makers orbiting our fragile ellipses. We all have something in us that blooms from
those moments and the seed chain of moments that follow. The basics are please see me, please hear me,
and please connect with me. Please
understand, accept, and believe in me. I
think that is the foundation of what makes us human.
Art is like
cheating. In fiction, a song, a
painting, poetry, theater, cooking, instrumentation, comedy, dance, film, etc.
a human can let light in and darkness out without feeling as exposed. Usually a deep personal connection is
required to get that kind of breath, relief, infusion of faith to bare the
human condition, but art, art is like a whole different way of breathing.
Maybe you felt if I saw
inside I would not want to stay or I would run or maybe even scarier for you,
you might want me to hang around for a while.
You might start to attach. You
don’t kiss a man like that, flash pufferfish leave and have his tongue not
struck with tetrodotoxin. I felt like
you stuffed the words, “oh by the way you know I like you right?” in a Molotov
cocktail cracked the door six inches to squeeze your arm through, tossed a
Mission Impossible these words will self-destruct message into my room and
bolted out of there wheels screeching.
When I was around you
I felt so alive, present. I saw your
mustang curves and dervish-lock wanderlust pensive yet throttled. I wanted to ride alongside you like figure
eights intersecting and undulating away into space recycling fresh exuberant
replenished to explode anew in each other’s gaze.
I tried to make you
comfortable, to feel safe. I tried to
read your heart and silences and give you this outlet of the written word to
face the thought that maybe a human was seeing the real imperfect you and
honestly interested in the complicated enigmatic celestial being that beats in
your skin. You told me, “Go slow. I am scary.
I will hurt you.” I did. You are.
You did.
I felt like I was
supposed to be in that moment to provide a patient landing place, a quiet for
you to be who you are unfettered like a gift the path of my life had brought me
to offer you like a glowing nest to be the rare bird you are. Maybe I needed to feel you land. Even if only for a moment you were to inhale
and exhale in bent warm twigs and yarn, buttons and moss changing each of
us.
The morsel was a
self-covenant to humbly take a chance in what I felt I saw in you. Whether you reciprocated was independent to
the idea that you brought my being to a place to want to take that chance, to
have faith in another human being based on unspoken, based on poetry, based on
a gut response, based on not being sure what words to say or what I even felt
or thought, based on what is not safe, based on hope in what the universe
is. I saw complementary talents. How can a person even think such things? It is blasphemy, “Oh look here is another
hendecagon. Who knows? I have to try. Fuck squares.
Fuck triangles. I am tired of
trying to fit with triangles.”
I am introspective,
creative, a warrior polymath with a pen bursting art from my heart, wanting to
help, deeply feeling into people on the primary and this other logical and
passionate cognizance of the big picture calm and sophisticated percolating systems
sometimes too caught up in thought to engage my urbanity with others. When you talked about how smart you were by
the river, then immediately sandbagging yourself by alluding to your mother’s
urge for you to ‘apply’ yourself that made a snapshot for me of how maybe you
see your relationship with intelligence.
I could tell you were smart, like really smart. I saw the broadness of your skillsets and it
prospered a natural affinity in me for you.
I thought maybe you
could not envision how being who you are could ever flow to a life where you
were ever truly understood and embraced to share a full love that allows you to
be who you are and receive and give love in the way some pit-part of you needs
to be loved and your mermaid tail naturally offers. There was an operatic heavenly delicate
tenderness imbedded in your aggressive independence.
Maybe it was a
beautiful beast that needed a beautiful beast.
Maybe it was like a merged image of the fairy tale, the woman who reads
books and the man with the tormented heart in fur and claws, a growling
cerebral image of a mixing male and a female version of the silken skin, horns,
fangs, and a delicate unbound raging passion inside each outsider being. Each is both, absent the awkward Stockholm
syndrome of the Disney version. Each was
reading and howling making life imbibing the insides of the self and the other
on a sofa and in the sheets. That maybe
you were different; that I was different; that this was different. It’s crazy; romance is madness.
That
moment at the top of the stairs, touching your back brushing my fingers across
your tattoos in the morning light, some moments can build or destroy planets in
blinks. Some moments stay like a trace
of light across the humming radix radiation of the big bang in their miniature
ways that can remind us what life is or at least what we think it is. Sometimes it is just morning and you react,
you’re not sure what to make of it, but it sticks with you until forget
washes.
I
have rarely imagined the possibility let alone the tipping point of feeling
there is someone with the same stardust who can help me take the next leg of
this journey together (the fork) to teach, to grow, to accept being vulnerable
to and accept help from. I am not saying
that was you, but I do feel like we probably had a chance here for something with
that potential, maybe; you passed; that’s ok, that opportunity is gone but all
these letters they weren’t bullshit.
They were me as a human trying to digest.
How does anyone parcel
the bite-size to swallow a digestible morsel of the immensity of what goes on
in one of the flashes that define our lives?
I felt like we saw each other beginning to un-shell in glaring
starkness. Drenching in poetry and dance
is to take our hands to cups, dip the lips below the surface of a pool and
drink not from the other, but in our most natural self the other allows us to
unclothe and drink from the universe inside us that we constantly are, but keep
behind a keyhole.
Having gigantic
insides is normal. We all have an
infinite jungle of feeling, thoughts, passions, and insecurities. When you touched me, when you spoke to me in
that soft pensive way something tapped me, flipped a switch. How do you look into another person’s eyes
and trust to dive, to just shamelessly dive and still feel free? I have never solved that paradox of that
alone and together.
Please do me the
happiness of putting your left palm on your chest, press it firm, close your
eyes and take two deep breaths. In that
darkness is where I wanted to know you, in that quiet space, that is where I
thought I might be able to fall in love with you. That space felt bigger to me and prospered
the cul-de-sac of emotion this letter attempts to exit.
I felt the universe
calling me to be vulnerable to that awakening whether I wanted to or not,
because admitting these thoughts to you is nothing if not bathing in humility.
Love is to taste a bounty
through the tongue of the other, to find that complementary flavor that
breathes fullness, to what is already complete.
Most of life is imbibed through one’s own lungs and buds. That taste does not change and is best
appreciated for the splendor of the portal through the self. However, love deliberate and fiery, still and
resplendent is the touchstone of comparison to comprehend the spectrum of what
life is in our most intimate attempt.
I know I wanted to try
with you. I wanted to try to intrepidly
care in that way that is risky. Part of
me was more willing to face that abyss of hope that love actually exists or
that I have any idea on what love feels like or how to accept or express reciprocated
love. The idea of being expected to know
how to accept or offer love to another human being seems like a foreigner’s god,
a sorrow-goblin, a same-old legend people are taught to believe. Fiction writers are professional
make-believers. To see any one person as
only exactly what they are is a barbwire shoelace to tie. To contemplate setting that first pawn to
motion two spaces out on the chess board to present the effrontery of, “I would
like to play with you. Please join
me. I know most of our pieces will end
up dead, but maybe there is chance at a heavenly stalemate.”
Fiction writers we
watch, we gape, ogle, and witness the world like a mirrored self-conscious
oblivion. We’re voyeurs wielding parodic
utensils to sculpt. We devour art to try
to understand what is going on, what people do like research of a galaxy under
a microscope to try to put a range to define what it is to be normal. Whomever you are felt like a watcher; like
maybe you might want to watch with me.
Not just like sardonic commentary on the geometric quad-cornered
drive-through aficionados, but insightful, sapient in the universal thread of
what is bigger on the inside and woven in a fabric of colors most people do not
see. I thought I might be able to
converse with you in a natural language frankly few have ever dared my tongue
to speak outside the written word.
I wanted to see if you
are a fellow old gypsy soul where meeting you was like remembering. Maybe knowing how to accept or recognize love
is somewhere in me like unearthing a relic. I am tired of being stared at like I am
speaking Farsi in Alabama with a colored fountain-pen tongue. Rumi, Neruda, Hemingway, Bukowski, Marquez,
Nabokov, or Shakespeare: what is love?
I thought you knew how
to convert passion, not into flattery, but bloom. My god did I think you could bloom, stamens
and petals bursting pollen with what I felt like a woman like you could do with
my words and art. I thought of where
your art could take me. I thought the
motion of your curves like a paint brush across the canvas of this planet could
inspire me a kinetic engagement to ignite the stillness of a raven at a writing
desk to fly.
I hold onto my alone,
my self-sufficiency and in the underbelly hold a fear of abandonment that makes
a poet who values love above all keep to himself trying to make sense of the
world because nothing he has ever tried has brought solid ground. That is a significant factor in why closure
for me with you was so important and part of why I wrote so much before and
wrote this letter, but not why I cared about you in the first place.
The idea that you chose
not to offer that kindness of a hug goodbye invalidated some of the roots to
try to regrow a forest within me of what love means. It ripped shoots out the soil. I do not need you. I do not need those roots. What we shared was real. It was beautiful in the moment it was. I see an ocean of potential that was there on
my end. You didn’t feel that way.
I look at my years and
out of that glass circus tent I have not had maybe anyone that shattered me
like you. You broke me out of the stance
I was in to want to exit that preconception that alone was safer, that keeping
my distance was safer. I was grateful
for that struggle.
The vast expanse of
your actual life I am functionally ignorant.
I know a fleck of paint on a street mural of a cat in a ball gown and a
Valkyrie helmet quietly reading a book while riding a Pegasus unicorn rocketing
rainbows out its ass soaring over a dystopian queer-scape of forest rave
parties, rooftop art canvases, and too-long lines at coffee shops listening to
Etta James and Grimes in divergent ear buds at light speed with basic human
doubts and quandaries nestled in a flower garden of skin. Maybe all I saw was a blip and imagined the
rest; it was up to you to paint the full picture. You had to share. You had to open up. I got that you were in a season of not ready
for that and anything you did share was a struggle from an unready place.
If nothing else know
that you are important. There is a
reason you are in this universe. I was
lucky to have met you. I will be fine
never feeling the warmth and complexity of that beautiful parcel of the
universe again, but I would rather risk appearing foolish in reaching out to
you than savor stoic regret or the steel of my own bricked in prison that
prompts me to push more people away who want to attempt to be in my life.
What I really needed
from the beginning was a hug. I needed
to look you in the eyes and tell you where I was coming from into meeting you
and where you had brought me. I needed
to feel heard on a sensorial level. I
needed you to look at that man, balance him out with some form of personal
disclosure. I needed a hug in that mutual
vulnerability like I was not a burden or an imposition. Then you could leave a man not more broken,
but infused with a manner of empathetic compassion he has so rarely if ever
received as we each moved forward. That
is what I needed. I needed you to exit
in a different manner than so many other people in my life. I needed that in a way that is probably not
fair to you.
It is really, really
hard for me to admit need, to say I need anyone for anything. My entire life has been built on independent
wherewithal. I had a reaction to you
that I didn’t pick. It is like I saw
your insides in a way I have never seen another human being. At times I felt like you might be the person
I am meant to be around.
There were too many
colors to un-see. I felt your heart
wanting to love, to try to love, to have feelings and be afraid, and let a tear
loose, to be vulnerable and change, to risk.
I knew my reaction came from some place I couldn’t control and I thought
maybe yours did too, but you blocked me out and it made me feel like everything
in my reaction to you was my imagination, like some story I wrote and I felt
more alone than I have felt in a really long time in a way of if what I felt in
my reaction to your being wasn’t mutually real then I have no god damn clue
about life.
I have been writing
you to try to get some sort of bearing to see what you were dealing with in
your story to get to me, like the weightiness of you. I needed to see your substance to distinguish
the portrait I saw behind your eyes.
Without that the ghost of the woman that instilled that reaction haunted
me. I feel like I probably could have
fallen in love with her and it freaking killed me inside. For me to feel the two roads we’ve been on and
to react that way to the you I saw in the silence, it is like I believed in god
a little bit again like life had miracles.
That divinity was like a thread not from a sentient deity, but a
divinity in what we all are, shown out to me through you to remind me of the
pulse to pay attention to in this world. I know that sounds obscene, quixotic, and
crazy.
I just wanted you to
offer me the kindness of a decent explanation, like burying a body, rather than
leaving it for the crows in the street.
Thank you for your
understanding as a fellow being.
Severus
