This and That. But Mostly This.

I've been writing a lot of poetry lately, and most of it has to do with Love.  Which is kind of stupid because Love's been doing a good job of kicking my ass lately.  Maybe that's the point.  What do I know?  I just sit down to write and this is what's been coming out.  I know I act like I got it all figured out, and sure I can fill out a suit nicely and be charming and make girls giggle their vodkas out their cute little noses.  And even, on occasion, manage to beguile one enough to make her show me how she looks without her vestments and pretensions.  But the truth is I'm lonely.  And I've come to realize, looking around at the circle of people I know and love, that I'm not alone in this solitude.

So many of my friends are in the middle of one kind of emotional crisis or another.  And the strange thing is that we all seem to leave each other alone to deal with our own shit.  Sure we try and talk to each other, we hang out and play music and watch movies and eat out and consume much wine.  But then comes the moment when everyone takes that short deep breath, as if preparing to jump off a cliff, and stands and begins to head their separate ways. 

I watch the couples with their strained body language, as if his body's speaking French and hers only speaks German.  They bump into each other, they ask each other if they should leave, some of them even drive away to separate homes, alone.  I watch the single folk like myself, take that moment and glance around the room and find not one face smiling back at them with that twinkling, mischief in the eyes.  The light that doesn't need a name or a label.  The one that leads to rumpled sheets and giggling midnight snacks.  And I watch the lovers, who are out the door before the rest of us, at least for now.


Why are we all such strangers to ourselves and then consequently to each other?  How easy it would be for us to be easy and free and loose in safe company.  So why aren't we?  I haven't been able to figure this out.  The closest I've come is thinking about the darkness that comes before us, the stuff that motivates our actions, defines our responses to stimuli, the dark strings of experience and thought that make us their puppets.  We are all strangers to ourselves because we are all strangers to the darkness that comes before us.  We are moved, we react in ways we are not aware of to point that we even react to our reactions.  We don't own the ground we stand upon.  So how can we ever be trusted to take a proper step?

It's strange how everything in my interactions with the opposite sex comes down to just the sex.  Is that all that one can gain from one another?  Is that the best we ever get?  Clearly not.  Look at some of our parents, or family members who seem to not only have survived in long marriages, but even managed to thrive.  Why can't we do the same?  Why are most of us great at the sex and the flirting and that initial high-school phase of things and then just fall into the comfortably slow spiral into hatred and loathing?  It's like we want our relationships to fail so we can get back to that heady initial phase with someone else.  It puzzles me greatly.

Why does the woman I loved call me when she's lonely?  Why does she feel lonely at all?  Why do I even answer when she does?  How many poems will I have to write before she either admits she loves me or just leaves me the fuck alone?  Why does she make me prove to her over and over again that I love her?  Why does she then turn around and tell me that she's afraid I'll stop loving her soon?  Why the hell am I still writing about this stuff?

Important questions all.

I just recently made a few new friends.  Wonderful, wonderful people.  But all suffering from self-esteems so beleaguered it takes my breath away.  I look at these people, who are so beautiful, and young, and full of potential, and intelligent, and vivacious.  And I wonder: Why do they allow the world, and its mediocre hordes to dictate how they should feel about themselves?  All our lives we put other people's opinions of us before our own.  In school we worry what the teacher's say, at home it's our parents.  On the streets its the friends and the boyfriends/girlfriends, in college it's our lovers, then our co-workers, and on and on.  We make ourselves feel constantly judged because in our minds the measure of the world is unceasing.  But it isn't the world that measures us.  The world doesn't care.  We do it to ourselves.  So why can't we just stop?

I spoke to a friend who's going through a breakup and I found myself entirely at a loss for words.  Me.  But what could I say?  I don't know why he never treated her like she deserved, I don't know why she never realized what she deserved from him was more until after so much of her heart was already his.  I don't know what she should do.  Hell I barely know what I should eat for breakfast most days.

And Facebook.  God do I need to rid myself of Facebook.  Do you know how many times I've checked my page as I wrote this?  I lost count after ten.  And no one wrote or updated or any of that shit.  And I don't really even truly care, so why do I check it?  When did my solitude, which was always a friend to me become so damn lonely?  It would be funny if it didn't happen everyday.

Well that's all for now.  Not exactly the most coherent of posts I'll admit but I was in the mood to ramble it seems.  I've not yet quite managed to yoke my thoughts to my words.  They both still storm against each other like armies in a siege.  I'm the just the bricks and mortar in between it seems.  The battleground for the their conflict.  The ground that has to hold the bodies and the blood.  Ooh, what a cheerful fellow I am this night.