April 28 - Letters to Luna

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