the pain is in the knowing
We long to be seen.
Not to be looked at but to have the gaze of another pierce through heart and mind and soul. Further still, into the deep marrow of our person, to the things we were sure that only we felt.
Such an experience is often excruciatingly bewildering. For there is no deeper place than the heart and no darker cavern than our desires.
This is the great virtue of poetry. It is why so many can be moved and understood by a single verse. It’s not that the poet knows us individually but because he knows mankind collectively. And he is well acquainted with the fact that each and every heart flutters and pumps with the same mass of fears and hesitations and worries.
He draws out the inexplicable and trods across the most sacred parts of us, revealing the thousands of minuscule infinitudes that we are so sure terminate within us.
It is the great miracle of the poet to truly understand and then cast it out as a sweeping net for all to see and read. And it is his great sin that he is incapable of doing the same for himself.
To the receiver, what blessed gift to be seen! What height of ecstasy to be known! How easily loneliness can be banished!
And yet to the poet, the pain is in the knowing.
elegy
Love lost is nothing compared to the loss of the little things in between.
For love in name only—stripped bare, cast out naked to walk the streets—is a terribly ignoble thing. Perverse in its own way. And damnable.
What good is love without palpitations of the heart? What good is love when the sight of you no longer sends me into catatonic states of ecstasy? What good is love when my breath no longer hitches, caught in my throat, at the very utterance of your name?
Love, for all its enormity, overshadows the tiny, minuscule “nothings” that, when summed, equate to a ponderous and weighty “everything.”
It can obscure, hide, and deflect until you finally turn it over and realize that whatever was meant to be underneath isn’t there—or worse, it never was.
I know your love, not because of your words, but because of the thousands of inconsequential things that occur too quickly for the eye or heart to comprehend.
Like how the barest suggestion of your neck blows my heart out of my chest. Or how there are days when a single word in a single text is a banquet for my famished soul.
Like how thinking about your very existence brings me to sobbing fits for reasons I can’t even begin to explain until I feel utterly mad and yet sane in equal measures.
Or perhaps it’s that even when I’m around you, I am filled with such a deep longing that my bones ache because even though you’re mine, body and soul, it’s still not enough somehow.
Throw away the word entirely. Banish all mention of love, and I would still know precisely what it is. I don’t need to hear it defined, explained, or demonstrated. You exude it, my dear. It cascades off of you in warm, transcendent tendrils. And I feel it, my love, in every part of me.
So let us cast off the word. It has no meaning for us. What we have can only be grasped at in the in-betweens—the tiny moments only we share, only we know. And in that way, it belongs to us.
You wreck me, my love.
something
When I was a young boy my mother would take me to the beach.
I would stand on the shore looking out over the vast expanse of ocean,
nearly catatonic, locked in place as warm water pooled around my ankles.
My mother would shout to me from her rusted beach chair:
“What you are you looking for?”
Not in an unkind way but in the tender and concerned way
that all good mothers do when their child is present yet far away.
And I would respond by saying, “something”,
as the salty air carried that single hushed word from my lungs.
Nowadays I find myself staring into mirrors and
window panes and reflective surfaces.
Catatonic once again.
Sunglasses on to keep my soul from slipping out.
If you asked me that same question from my boyhood,
my answer would still reek of ambiguity.
Something. I’m looking for something.
eidolon poetry 