On 9/11/16 Thinking of Hearts Broken and What Love is

9/11 brings to my heart the thought of broken, family deceased, perished in heinous smoke. I would much rather think of love today and to a measure broken hearts.  I wrote this as part of my last book.

The illusion of two single individuals loving in monogamous commitment may most easily be seen in the ideas of unrequited love or the cessation of requited love or although potentially unique in one’s lifetime a broken heart can reveal to a human being a greater detail of what love actually is by having one’s heart broken by another person who was never actually in love with them. 

This may sound like a bizarre equine Hellenic gift.  The pain that comes in thinking one was experiencing mutual love validated in burden and vulnerability from its impetus.  Sometimes this comes in our classroom locker years, sometimes with mortgage debt or tragedy of untimely death.  In it is a core understanding that love is a mathematical equation of reciprocity where the energy offered to better the other exponentially betters the self.  This occurs not in the act of the other’s reciprocation in kind to offer, but in the self’s internally generated consciousness with the common universe. 

This may sound lofty or contrived naïve bullshit, but in my experience that is how a person knows she or he is participating in love, because when you give you get.  Knowing where the getting is coming from might be tricky.  We so often associate the feeling with the other person.  The other person appears to allow us to feel this way or give us this feeling.  We might treasure them above any being for this dynamic, but that is not what love is. 

Love is an equation of one’s relationship with the self that is broadened by the other.  We gain access to doors inside our relationship with the self that do not open in isolation.  The other does this for us sometimes even when we are not doing this for them.  This often happens not because we are not trying, but because the other person’s relationship with his or her self is not opening his or her internal door.  We may do this for them and they may not do this for us.  Thus the record industry.  This is how one can so severely confuse mutual love for unilateral.  When combined and each person chooses to open that door the grandeur of the universe to humanity is revealed in ways like nothing else.

Volition can shift at any moment.  The crucible of the now holds that any relationship including marriage exists only in the choice in the now.  We can choose to close or open that door at any moment.  The Meme, god, the marital contract, or sex do not manifest or perpetuate the bond.  The bond is created in the choice on the table of the now.  When love shifts from unilateral or reciprocal to unrequited our ability to morn a broken heart and love another displays our most beautiful universal potential.  Love did not have to be encompassed in that individual.  We were never only loving that individual.  They were never only loving us.  Love is not encompassed in the self or the self we perceive our being to be. 

When our beloved dies we go on loving them in a way that yes transforms, but lives.  Our door can still be open without her or his body.  An airplane into a building, cancer, a bullet, a bomb, a car, a blocked ventricle, our heart knows not the rules that say you stop here.  We are born to love relentless, to bond, and to burst into a common universe.  In this way even tragedy can help show us what love is. 

Some may choose to only love one individual, some a few, some many.  The options are not as pertinent as one understanding that only what is empathetic to all that we are (our self, partners, others, progeny, society, (i.e. the universe)) is the love that truly connects us as the whole.  This requires the release of individuality our own and our partners.

We are in love and she or he leaves us.  She is engrained in our ego, a solidified envisioned component of our mandatory self.  Extracting her damages our ego, carves it out unimaginable that only she can fit.  Depression, rationalization, bartering through a grief process may try to stuff fluff into that hole or control an impossible scenario to plug her back in there, but that is all ego, all self. 

The path of love is to love as deeply and as passionately as one chooses in the moment of now.  Hearts break, volition changes or continues, but all one can do is have our say to let the other know how we feel and let that human go to choose us or not.  Pining and wanting and torturing the self to comfort that part of the ego one has placed specificity outside the individual as part of the ego only shows the non-necessity of the ego as an entirety.  The whole image of the ego, the whole painting, the words chosen, the faces chosen, they are all optional and a discretionary illusion.

The path out of heartache like that is to take that specificity out of the image of self one carries, trading the next body in to mask the pain is a common solution.  The psychologist William Glasser might call this the person we picture in our quality world in Choice Theory.  The better option is to accept the now, to lose the ego entirely.  Love where one can.  Love the universe through the self when no one is there. 

When facing that vast warehouse of loneliness, when the darkness crimps its prognathous jaw, we try to see the unending possibility, the lack of lines in the darkness, the absence of ego in what can be.  That is the beauty of the darkness loss can bring a person, the possibility that in the absence of the other the self perceived as so mandatory, so essential, the complete opposite is a place of growth. 

The predecessor image of the beloved acted in ways as a limit, a box our love had to conform.  She or he was a line to construct a peristaltic wall in the warehouse constricting and challenging us to either evict such malignant addictions or suffer a lack of growth.  With him gone in the nothing, the universe opens, and that at times can be god damn beautiful.  We begin to actually understand the relationship of the self by better assessing what the love we experienced actually was on a structural level.  We evaporate blame.

In this broken hearts are some of the most powerful and gorgeous experiences in the human journey.  We grow to shed the ego by understanding the blurred lines of the self dissolving into offering our volition fueled love to the whole in the consenting form that presents in our now.  We learn to let go, not to attempt to own another or be owned, but to be, to simply be.

The sexual act reverberating through our most powerful mental process of orgasm may be a representation of the potential concurrent emotional portal connecting the single-self as the spiritual universe opening through sexual connection.  We are eternal in both tangent planes, but the closest some of us may come to tangency is through intimate emotional sexual bonding exploding through the orgasmic transcendence of our biological form.  The flood and aftermath is often love.  This act, this experience is at the core of human social structure for so many reasons, but none more so than this.  We cannot control love.  We cannot control the universe.  All we can do is choose and be. 

Why Don’t You Smile More?

Narcolept in surgery on the table flat lined year

Injected topical, a single tear and the scalpel slices gum tissue 

Overhead projector for a nine thousand dollar three hours

To crack a jaw, hammer teeth and remove the work of sixteen years ago

Three implants and a fourth tooth root canal removed

Quartered smile sequestered behind the idea that it has not been real

Since third grade, lumber, bike, and face

Blood a classroom after two weeks not wanting to walk in or smile big

Explain that I felt like it was my fault, Catholic school rim of desks

Went outside the boundary of providence and busted permanence

Intentional behavior beyond the domestic standard

So that in eighth grade in a fight to not throw a punch

To have the weakest in the triad dislodge in a week on New Year’s Day

Spit out and acknowledge retained learning of how to defend one’s self under god

Of what one is told and does not do to obey and seek redemption

In quiet and notebooks and blue carpets and red glob spit

Dunked in milk, grass, and denture cleaner

Nail fungus and braces tightrope walking placeholder

Straight aligned and long term thinking  

Ramones one, two, three, four punk suburban brain

Percolating college implants as a finish line for mouthing the metal

Eruptions and failure and ripping out and looking in the mirror near forty

And feeling like the monster an ex-wife spun and daughter shuns

A gaping hole and fangs, blood and cadaver banked bone

Sterilized to insert and rebuild to have me readied to drill in again

Put more metal in me, improved technology cyborg zombie

A year from now after this surgery, six months, and six months after healed enough

To be picture ready and for now I don’t want to wear the partial

The temporary or whatever the fuck you call this plastic tray four toothed sham dish

Gums are swollen, sliced and raw and the pressure of it is more pain

For what; appearances for the folks at work on the street as if I don’t sound

Like a failed whistler or could frighten children beast style if given the sidewalk

Whatever; it’s just a stupid modern mime about body parts insignificant

Something punk in not wearing frontals that makes me a bit happier

Missing yoga with the fatigue, amplified by the not sleeping kind of sucks though

Staying up staring at pillows or computer screens

Eating around anything that requires biting

Sipping season and mashed carrots, library audiobooks, and online matrix

Water the rosemary and clean the turtle shit

Driving two hours to a meat plant and watch the boxes of animal skeletons  

Men slice blood and cow legs and ribs crack

Heads in slaughter closet in Nebraska away from here by eighteen wheeler

My thoughts are about barcodes and accounting, scan guns and documenting

How not to fuck up; staring at an atheist’s god

Wanting there to be something more than these books I’ve written

Hours scribbled and texts to a daughter who randomly answers

With her trying to figure out twelve and for all these black hole reasons

I am banished from participating how or where I want

And the word family feels like a third grade classroom

Wanting me to piss my khakis or slam my smile into a cubbyhole snuff film

Repeated until a custody trial questions why I don’t enough

Or I worry I am recycling Freudian desire to have my old life back in some trap

The fear of the surgery was coming and I felt time shortening

Pressure of wanting family and god, wife and child

To go back to a place of pain in a masochistic torture drone camera lens

Because venturing out has brought so much rejection

Question the questioning, the odyssey and wanting it to end

In some enveloped pointlessness, wanting to not exist like fifteen year old suicide

Joking on sidewalks summarily rejected digging through grass for missing pieces

Plugging holes with whatever is found nearby wind picking up blades

Green and red and dirt and a sky god obliterated and resurrected

In answerless answers to a thirty seven year old man lying on a surgery table

Asking to be drugged with laughing gas and the doctor forgets

And I lie there and take chisel and pay to have teeth whacked

Arms prone and refusing to budge allowing the confrontation unabated

Like a good boy with his obedient tongue and gnarled silence

Wheeled out in a chair to his mother, rolling home to the empty stairs full of pictures

In the illusion of space hoping the exhaustion will allow the pillow, sleep 

Bleached Coral 20160901

A year in or twenty nine depending on how one counts

Morning bites into solid food for the last time in a while

Laughing at the sidebar of a medical surgery

Teeth toying with me since I was eight: in and out

Recycling an approach of wanting to speak and not

Scripting notebooks and silence like lattice work crossed and peeking

Through the apertures of school yards, cafeterias, and upstairs libraries

To sequester to best not say much

Or feeling that way as if this were a barrier embossed

For the welded notion that big brother rather I did not join in

That we had divergent concepts of playtime between He-man and marijuana

Skateboards and Thunder Cats, father with shotguns and construction hammers

To G.I. Joe and bashed in incisors and a bloody skull bouncing concrete

Mother recollecting hearing the screams from down the street as the zombie walk home

Now sitting in an oral surgeon’s waiting room recounting to doc

Some irrelevant side story as he is about to collect his twenty-five grand from her son’s pocket

In a year of ripping out the failed implants to insert the bone of deceased bodies  

Transplant my gum tissue and replace four front teeth

So I can now officially be part of the walking dead

And I take my valium pre procedure and laugh

At the year that is to come to hopefully regrow cellular bonds as host

The mantra of it could always be worse and the privilege of affording

What is not covered by any insurance or payment plan because my mother

Once told me I would always have teeth and when I look at her I want to make her words

True here, not like Jesus or America, but at least this

At least to know that whatever monster I invented in my youth staring back

At me in the mirror tonight at thirty seven with four black holes stitched scar tissue

Smile out of a prison riot that there is laughter to be had

Such a frivolous appendage in a smile, the one taken for granted

In why an ex-wife chortled why I did not use mine more

Or a daughter gets so confused about who is Quasimodo

The swelling and staving infection and the spider web memories

Of junior high removable retainers and dentures with floating bicuspids

Chompers and delightful chalk mouth spelling and erasing memories of attempted kisses

And that Cato Stoic approach of testing the ridicule to care only about what is worth caring

Concern in becoming so that one can no longer be embarrassed by showing up alone

Or with his gay best friend and people saying this or that because fuck them

He is my friend and although we are not lovers I love him

World you can take and give teeth and at times my smile

You can sway these tears of facing that side of the bed empty

I will take the cushion of mediation and sit in that chair of surgery

I will bleed

I will take the injections absent the nitrous and pierce the thinning tissues

Holding this failing implanted metal and raze to the absent bone

And say I do not yield

I do not yield for you to say there is a mirror image to the fault in our stars to smile upon

That I am not this hunchback cast of daughter or wife or town

Flooded of Christ’s kiss and barren of star to wish

The salt of these waterfall eyes shall taste resolve upon these toothless lips

I shall cry thee freedom in surgical light

So that you may rip my bone and hammer

Chisel to pound what I spent an adolescence praying for to see this bulwark

Of independent romance fail but again and I shall smile at you with the humility

Of a first world problem, lavish and preposterous at how little such a thing is

As a sophomore’s self-esteem, oh ye angels of dentistry and mandible lutes

Play me into eternity in this piteous body, so feckless and wrought

Of spirited bone, let me rise from this merged in atom and frivolity

In the swelling and the ache of hours grinning for I have paid Charon’s toll

To smile at yee, I  have tossed my coin into the pyre

To have my haughty laugh

That I am still here a body crimpled and asked not to speak

In this rock chalk words jumbled and puzzle-toothed

Poetic and barbarous as to who will understand

Not enough country or friendliness or beauty in shine for some

And so the oceans spin round the rock, yet

I am still here growing like bleached coral painting anew