Lonliness

Loneliness

Resides

In the doldrums

In the darkness

In the falling rain

In the empty house

(In the hollowness of my heart)

Resides

Loneliness

 

Without Rocks

I went for a walk

Searching for rocks to collect

Instead I found you

Between the rain drops

A voice in the wind

A memory moving with the clouds

A reflection in the ripples of the water

I returned home without rocks

With words in my pockets

I found along the way

 

 

Moleskin

Moleskin notebook

Capturing the spilling of emotion

Every feeling and movement

Written on blank pages with dull ink

And flamboyant rhythms

Till the night gives way to morning

 

 

Our Language

Poetry is our language

A drop of rain on a blade of grass

An empty glass on a marble bar

Absinthe eyes looking away

Red wine and broken bottles

Burnt out candles

Wax hardened on used books

A lingering scent

Of words not spoken

On empty pages of time

Black brush stokes

Rain soaked pain

Cold coffee in dirty mugs

Sweat soaked insomniac sheets

Chasing your mirage in dreams

Our language is poetry

 

 

 

Depression

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness. She knew there was no point in being here, in being alive, but she had no energy to think concretely of how she could kill herself. She lay in bed and read books and thought of nothing. Sometimes she forgot to eat and other times she waited until midnight, her roommates in their rooms, before heating up her food, and she left the dirty plates under her bed, until greenish mold fluffed up, around the oily remnants of rice and beans. Often, in the middle of eating or reading, she would feel a crushing urge to cry and the tears would come, the sobs hurting her throat. She had turned off the ringer of her phone. She no longer went to class. Her days were stilted by silence and snow."

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Three Stones

Can you taste the uncertainty in my kiss

Feel the doubt on my skin

I was broken

I fell to the ground

I am frightened (now) to surrender my soul

To relinquish my secrets

I waiver in my desires

I question all the motives

I hide

Taking shelter from the emotional rain

Can you hear my heart trembling

Feel the defeat in my touch

The waterfall of love is hidden

In the desert of sunken gardens

A compass on my body

Is the answer to the riddle of the three stones

Can you reach my hand in the dark

Feel the tenderness still inside of me

 

Leonard Cohen ~ Beneath My Hands

"Beneath my hands

your small breasts

are the upturned bellies

of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move

I hear the sounds of closing wings

of falling wings.

I am speechless

because you have fallen beside me

because your eyelashes

are the spines of tiny fragile animals."

~ Leonard Cohen, Beneath my Hands

Can You

Can you taste the uncertainty in my kiss

Feel the doubt on my skin

I was broken

And I fell to the ground

I am frightened to surrender my soul

To relinquish my secrets

I waiver in my desires

I questions all the motives

Fleeing into myself I hide

Taking shelter from the risks

Can you feel my heart trembling

Feel the fear in my touch

To Be Naked

To be naked is to be known. To be naked not in the physicality of seeing skin or to be gazed upon but rather naked inwardly, a disrobing of the soul. A soul, a human, a person without fig leaves or loin clothes to hide behind in judgment and shame. To be naked is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable is to accept worthiness, accept love, accept acceptance. To be, rather than not be; vulnerable, loved and accepted is our birthright because we are alive.

These three gifts are are always present, patiently waiting to be believed in. True nakedness is subversive. It reveals the folly of a puritanical obsession with the prohibition of physical nudity. It is easier to cover or legislate the covering of skin than to do the psychological and spiritual work of uncovering true naked authenticity. With the manifestation of authentic nakedness - physical nakedness would loose its taboo. Even in a strip club where ample skin is available to be gazed upon, "... nudity is a costume. Some of the quest for authenticity that the customers were on was a result of this — they wanted to see that final costume drop away" (Virginia Vitzthum, G-strings and Ph.D.s, http://www.salon.com/2003/06/12/frank_7/%0A).

Is that not what we all want from our friends, lovers, family? All the costumes to drop away so our true selfs can breathe.

 

Darkness

I opened all the windows

While

You were closing all the doors

And

The sun sank in the east

While

The darkness swallowed our love

Your Eyes

Lift me to your eyes

With the softness of your fingertips

Till our mouths meet

And I am lost with you

Mark Strand ~ From Not Dying

"The years change nothing.

On windless summer nights

I feel those kisses

slide from her dark

lips far away,

and in winter they float

over the frozen pines

and arrive covered with snow.

They keep me young."

~ Mark Strand, from Not Dying

Octavio Paz ~ From Sunstone

"To love is to struggle, to battle,

if two kiss, the world changes,

desires take on flesh, thoughts

take on flesh, wings sprout

on the backs of slaves.

If two kiss, if we kiss,

the world becomes real,

we cease to be ghosts,

we look at each other

and we see… we see."

~ Octavio Paz, from Sunstone

Into Tomorrow

I want to follow you

Into tomorrow

(with)

The light

From yesterday

I Remember A Kiss

I remember a kiss

Long ago

"Racing in the street..."

Down kingsway

Time for goodbye

Time for hello

In the car

In the night

Goodbye

Goodbye

Again

And

Again

Over

And

Over

A kiss in the morning

A phone call the next day

A letter

Then silence

Goodbye can last so long

As

Kisses fade into the night

 

 

Something As

Something as simple

As...

Not letting a screen door slam

Lighting candles

Playing soft music

Fresh sheets

Wind softly ringing chimes

Quiet shade

Poetry served on tarnished silver platters

Empty benches under willow trees

Incense burning at twilight

Chianti from Tuscany

Grass beneath tired feet

Swimming naked in mountain streams

A fire at midnight

A full moon

Falling asleep in lovers arms

Coffee at dawn

Together in bed

Something as simple

As...

Lost Love

I feel deeply

Fidelity fueled passion

Each lost love

A dagger thrust into my heart

Help me in the night

Hold me close

When the memories come

And the daggers twist

Sleep impoverishes my soul

Deja vu terrors wake me

Faces and fingertips

Forgotten words

Hold me

Till I am sleeping again

My love

My muse

Dance Me

"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Dance me to the end of love..."

~ Leonard Cohen, Dance Me To The End of Love

 

 

Till Daylight

Sincere touch...

A hug like no other.

Arms wrapped around exclaiming, "you are special to me."

"I miss you" spoken in a kiss.

A grasp on a arm to say, "you are loved."

A touch of a hand.

Fingers caressing while whispering, "let the pain go."

Seemingly small gestures during a dark night.

Saving a life.

Till daylight comes.

“...slow hands of the living damnation.”

And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition. "One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?” Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas."
~ William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Parking Spot

Skin on skin

Ink on skin

A name, memory and place

All the time

Separating then and now

The space between the letters etched on my body

In-between which the mysteries are felt

The little spaces of sharing

In the attempting to understand

A parking spot

To rest

To make love

To be

To talk

To sleep

Till the dawn of answers

Ascends with the attempt to know another

Skin on skin

Ink on skin

Things I Like To Do ~ August 1989

 

 

 

 

A Conversation...

 

 

A conversation I once had:

"I love you."

"I know." She replied. "I can tell by the way you look at me."

"What would you do if I kissed you?"

"Kiss you back." She answered.

And then the moment slipped away into the afternoon light as we sat across from each other at the cafe content in knowing the truth. We loved and we confessed it and we knew more in those moments than many feel in a lifetime.

 

 

Won't Ever Go Away

"You can never replace anyone because everyone is made of such beautiful specific details."

~ Celine, Before Sunrise

"I guess when you're young you just believe there will be many people with whom you connect with. Later in life you realize it will only happens a few times."

~ Celine, Before Sunset

 

 

 

Everything about us was true. All we went through was real and honest. Our time together is what life is - the full spectrum of emotions and experiences. No other people in relationships had it better or easier, no others were more or less in love. Any one who says that or pretends that are liars - to themselves and to each other. No relationship is ideal or without difficulties because two people are mysteries to each other and themselves - it is in the discovery of oneself and each other that we become who we can be together. We faltered and we got lost and were not able to find our way back to each other. In the fog of resentments and disappointments and the passing of time we changed as does everyone. I am sorry for my disorientation, my inability to communicate, my failure at loving in ways you needed to be loved. I miss and love you still. I don't believe that will ever go away.