The Loss of Poetry

I feel sorry quite often for the world we live in. All the mundane to more traumatic things. But the mundane nips at me especially. The insidious things that can block a person's path. Fear. Worry. Insecurity. Hesitation to wear a certain outfit. Fear of exposing true and even risky thoughts or emotions. Concern that someone else might think you uninteresting, boring. The way those things and things like them inhibit people and shut them up because other people with the same fears have transmuted their fears into fragile yet consuming narcissisms (inward blame vrs outward blame - how the two love the other). But the idea of winning favor is such a misguided one. Draining - the repugnant pursuit of gained approval - and yet such a trap so easily walked into day after day when decisions are made based on if they make us more lovable or not. Are we even individuals then? Fleshy and real?

“There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagements with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love. While we will necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.”

My body needs it—the hot baths, the care, the soft water, the perfume, the warmth. I take on the colors of the flowers, the bloom, the delicacy. It becomes me.

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat.”

What is it that a shadow is trying to say / with the borrowed tongue of silence? Here I stand, // having heard all that has been said, / and like the prolonged abundance of an olive tree // I recall only the beauty of a life, / vast and resilient.

slicing gaping wounds in all your glances. / And there, just where the pain makes you stop and think, / that’s the very place / I put down my roots.