Enough is Enough.

I was too tired for poetry tonight.  Too confused to make any sense.  Although one of my dearest friends told me that my poems don't really make all that much sense either.  And I looked over the last few months worth of work and realized that he's correct, although not in the manner that he meant.  Adorable and intelligent as he is, his brain simply ceases to function when he sees a poem, even those as simply imagined and constructed as mine.  What I saw didn't make sense was how many of them were about this one theme, this one girl who walked away, and then stopped, almost within arms reach, waiting for me to wait for her waiting for her confusion to fade and her love to return from wherever it had gone.

So many of the poems I've written over the last three months have been for, about, because of this woman.  And I'm not defending the volume of poesy I've laid at this lady's clearly absent feet.  Poetry for me is the words that burn in me, fires lit against all the darkness and absences I face, fires lit for all the comfort and joy I find in camaraderie and family.  Fires lit to dance around alone for the joy of being me, and alive, and awake.  And for a while - she burned brightest in me, and for a while it seemed, all she could do was burn me.

But what I wondered about was how long I dwelt in the ashes, and wrote only about the shadows she cast upon me.  There was a lot of light too.  How quickly did I forget that?  I have always thought of myself as someone with a pretty high emotional quotient.  I've always managed to maintain my equilibrium in all the storms I have had to weather in my modestly interesting and tumultuous life.  I knew who I was, and I liked what I saw in the mirror.  I was equal to the world and whatever it threw at me.  Turns out I was wrong.  I wasn't prepared for this woman.  And I'm glad I met her precisely for that reason.

After weeks of pretending I was okay, that I understood, that I had moved on and all the silly games our minds play with our hearts and our hearts delight in fucking with.  Never love the person you think or hope or imagine a person to be.  Love the person as they actually  are.  Never paint a person in colors they have never seen.  Your ultimate and inevitable heartbreak will then not be their fault.  It would be like blaming a mute for making a racket.  And I don't mean that caustically.  How can we expect straight forward honesty from each other if we just keep talking incessantly about ourselves and telling all our little self-aggrandizing tales and just overwhelming the other person's ability to gauge our true selves.  The answer is not more communication it's less communication.  Our bodies know our truths far more viscerally than our clouded minds.  Listen to your body language, watch theirs.  Listen to the rustle.  It'll tell you if your relationship is alright.

Be silent in your wisdom darlings.  Be humble in her presence.  And let her grow to be humble in yours.  Realize that you stand with the one person with the key to your final door, the one that holds all the light.  Get out of your own way.  Rid yourself of your fear and self-loathing and doubt.  Behold the miracle in their eyes.  Feel her heart beat its perfect counterpoint to yours.  This may seem silly and poetic and a whole bunch of bunkum and bullshit.  But I have felt this way, fiercely.  We must love ourselves grandly.  We are worthy of such love.  We really are.  Only then will the love we share the world come from truer waters.

I'm sorry my dear ______.  I'm sorry for all the poems that made you sad or upset.  I want you to know that they weren't Truth.  But rather an honest admission of a zephyr eddying in the storm that had descended in my life when you walked away.  They are little honest packets of me.  Far less than their sum and far more fleeting.  I wrote all my sweetest ones for you also.  Don't look at the angry ones, or the sad ones or the happy ones alone.  Look at them together.  And they are not the fires of you that burn in me, merely the flickers of shadow cast by your flame.   I just write them away as I feel them so they don't take hold on my core.  And it's foolish to expect our feelings towards each other to be simply one thing or another.  They never could.  You and I go far too deep to ignore the turbulence we cause in each other.  Admit it.  Accept it.  Move on.

That's my mantra now.  I am who I am exactly as I am supposed to be.  I have a long way to go.  But I'm happy where I am as well.  I am on the path.  And I am unafraid.