We think about love
in our mud-rusty blanket phase
and we come up with ultimatums:
Ultimately, for me to move on,
I had to cut off contact with you,
had to leave the sphere of life
you maintained and spread
my wings to fly away.
I cannot imagine it happening
any other way, cannot imagine
life as it could have been,
but it could have been different
and I’m so happy it’s not.
I’d be somewhere, unhappy
because I was not an artist,
I was a lover with a chained wrist,
a writer without pens
mired in a bog of could-have-beens,
because now I’m in New York,
living life dreamily and writing
all these words to make up
for any hurt you might have caused me.
Because I did hurt,
and that is why I left,
I needed a change,
a nut in my brain tightened
and I stopped paying
attention to you, stepped
out of your world-sphere
and into dreams
made of Katmandu
and Australian women
with pretty smiles
and blonde hair
and it was enough
to distract me,
at least for a while.
I changed so much,
found out the world was bigger,
found out I was smaller
and found, upon coming back,
that my life needed more
and I needed to pay better attention
to all of it and use my dreams
as fuel to get somewhere
and I did. I’m now somewhere,
doing something
and so are you,
but reading those old thoughts
brought me back to a time
when it all was as simple
as the next best line
I could give you
to make you feel
beautiful. Life isn’t like that
anymore, it’s more complex,
and more rewarding,
but something about first love
leaves me wishing I could
always be back in that first moment,
that agony of pain in my chest
like rain on a sunflower,
dripping from me
and lighting up my world
with summer and winter
all at the same time,
two juxtaposing limitless forces
combining to rhyme
themselves over and over again.
I’m embarrassed to be who I was
back then, but it taught me
that I need to fight my battles
with my pen and dream up stories
that make people laugh and cry
and feel something close
to what it was I felt
when I first saw you
and my throat closed up,
my hands were sweating,
my heart was beating faster
than a mouse faced with a sleeping
cat, and I saw your face
and said THAT is what I want.
And I never got it,
which is maybe why every
relationship I’ve had has sprung
out of another ending,
maybe I’m just pretending
they are all you and that’s what
I want. But I don’t think that’s true.
I wanted the picture of you
I kept in my head, because in the end
I never really got to know you
the way he did, and I’ve found out
since there is more to a relationship
than almost kissing on the lips
and talking in cold streetlights
well into the night. It takes
more than that to make two people
one. And I love my woman now,
she is radiant and golden
and has taught me about the world
in ways I never dreamed
and complicated my ideals
and set me up to become
greater than I can imagine,
but I think part of me
will always be that small boy
inhaling love in a small high school
auditorium at fourteen years old.
I never want to lose that,
and that part of me will always be there,
always ready to find beauty
in the first morning hours
when she wakes up,
turns over and stretches
into a tea-cup, wearing
old big t-shirts and glasses,
laughing and yawning
as she sips english breakfast
and tries to tell me
I’m ridiculous
for bringing beauty
out this early. But
I’ve found it again,
this spark to write down
details of life,
feeling words the way
a warm fire feels
on a frosty evening;
finding beauty
in demagoguery
and hegemony,
passing consonants
to and fro,
assonations
and alliterations
rambling high and low.
But what I’m most grateful for
is a chance to re-visit
the pure passionate self
that created so much art
so fearlessly and with such wealth
of talent and courage
that I envy him his point-of-view.
There was only one way
to see things and he saw it
clear as day, saw the world
change and move
around one stationary object:
Love.
And a part of him
still does.
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