Tag: love

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There is no Word 

  

A word run rough shod over

centuries long rendering it

nearly vacuous, the emotion

contained within reduced to 

pithy sayings and pathetic poems,

some I have penned myself,

and pretty memes inspiring

less than more by over exposure,

how can this word be explained,

described and painted accurately?

Perhaps a paragraph filled with

affectionate acts is enough:

a driver slamming the brakes

screeching at a near miss cat kill, or

the 80 year old’s collapse at his sixty

year marriage’s cease upon awakening

to his wife’s motionless body, or

the wide open daddy arms anticipating

embrace at the first steps’ trail’s end?

Too Hallmark, Facebook sentimental?

What about soldiers or police officers

arm in arm in solidarity, peril-pals

undying, or prom dates in wide grins,

shy shoulder-slumped and side glance

photos or sunset hand-holding clips

or tears and aching hearts and darkness

as corollary preceded by its inverse,

heart-pounding, heady ecstasy-like

near nausea and enervating hysterical

joy found only in the scent, touch and

sound of the key to a lock match tight,

the yes to the life-long approval sought?

Too banal, trite, common, overblown?

Try this:

What is the square root of a 24-hour

day that begins in darkness with a howl,

signaling the death knell to the dying wish

of a martyr–just one more hour’s peaceful

sleep–a howl that electrocutes nerve

endings everwhere, that only patient 

tender care will quiet a defenseless being

suckling, emitting the sweet aromas of

new warmth baking mother’s milk like 

raisin toast popping sweet and savory,

and a once eyes-for-only lover cum

zombie escaping grey-eyed and sallow

briefcase in hand out the door shut-grunt

leaving only wispy cool air in a dim den’s

stale morning stuffy exhausted eye-burn,

bone-weary sympathy for the life made

and lived now, nostalgia and hope stew 

simmering on the stove daily, all repeat,

all gone now the glimmering show in 

new leather pumps price-tag clicking 

and tailored skirts tucking in silk blouses

hanging dusty in closed closets blear-eyes

catatonically fix on blindly automatonic as

day ends where it began, only now the 

briefcase rests against the chair close

to the snores emitted from the dead man’s

sleep craved more than the man who

made this life leaked out exhaled in the

other’s breath and yours, theirs, ours hourly,

daily, yearly and ever so in smiles and frowns,

razored sight and heart, grim boredom and

coffee steam morning’s quiet contentment

and grasping an idea finally that endings

and beginnings are the same and conclusions

are illusions and passion is stillness while 

death has always meant living, the chaos of

it the only order ever it was, patterning 

a day-long life? The square root of it.

That, my dear, generates, defines and

encapsulates the engine and caboose.
 

Happy pledge, notice and honor to what makes us, us.

 

 

  

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Edvard Munch’s ‘Separation’

  
Painting: “Separation” by Edvard Munch 1898, oil on canvas.
 

A smoldering heart weakens,

hunkers him down gut deep

inside separation’s burn.

When distance collects between

a lover’s love and loving hand,

the road span widened, dear doves,

a brooding beat blackens fear,

rends aortic drums split sideways,

burst blood pooled and anchoring.

Longing’s weight drowns victims,

pins their boots to muddy bog,

only sludge and sink might free

the ache, loosed from bony cages

as echo moans sorrow’s sympathy.

Severance maims this lover’s heart, 

rendering touch crumpled amputee:

grip-shattered, shivering despair. 
 

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My Mistress Keep

 
 
My mistress loves me because I am not hers to keep.

I’m sure this is true.

She told me so herself.

She said, “I get the best of you. The rest your wife gets.”

I cannot deny it.

That I love our secret love,

safe like the internet.

Everyone hides in the safety of their slippers and screen

to enact who they believe they are 

and do their best selves because no one really checks,

no one wants to call bullshit,

end the game so

just go with the make believe.

For us too when we are together, 

 we two for a few,

a cherished time between us to live high just a while.

I mean, who does not want to be loved like crazy?

To meet up in the imagination’s room and lie for a while.

I am not hers,

and she is not mine, 

but I can be sure she keeps me

close in her dreams,

so that upon awakening in warmth and quiet

soft pillows under her head

and silken comfort between her thighs

she feels me beneath the sheets as good as there

from so much practiced production

the fantasy we inhabit

every time we meet.

Oh yes, but she is mine.
 

credit: wikiart.org

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In want of the can’t have: love poem of the mistress addiction

  
(LOVE – Oil on Canvas by Michel Ditlove)
 

Be my bittersweet, 

my never have, 

never and always want to have fantasy. 

Be the ever longing up my sleeve 

to pull out on a rainy day 

when love is dried up, wasted and wanting. 

Be my can’t be, 

my dying to keep and ready to lose everything. 

Think of me with you, 

carry me deep, 

breathe my outside in 

and draw me near as I do you

however far you are from me. 

Dream me by your side upon awakening 

and let me lull you to sleep

with my weighty invisibility. 

Let my curdling heat linger on your skin, 

arouse your thickening drowse 

til you darken the conscious keep, 

lights out of your mind. 

Be my owner, 

the idea of us, 

on the leash of imagination 

impossible to lock and cage 

for wishes bait but won’t be bound.
 
Be my whisper’s discrete,

my here and only now,

for no past is ours but pretend,

no future to go there ever be.

My one true zen love,

be my soft kiss of the hand

that airily slips through mine 

like a memory’s warm breath

upon the shadow of my nape.

Be my long lost lover never found

and not a care for caring til it’s gone.

Be the stinging sleight 

and the honeyed finger slid in sheets.

Be mine of the moment gone for good.

Be my sweet bitter sweet.

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Cheers to You

  

 

“Have a good day. Stay out of trouble,” she says as she pats his naked ass and then flies out the door, already late for work.

Here’s to a year of self-possession and comfort, independence and fulfilling your own expectations. Here’s to love and familiarity, trained fingers and lips finding all the right grooves. Here’s to kindness of kin, those who have your back and keep you no matter what. Here’s to the empathy of strangers and believers. Here’s to compassion and good samaritans, accidental heroes and intentional fools. Here’s to health and good cheer. Here’s to you.

To another year with you in it. 

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I do not love the holidays

  

 

I am not going to say I hate the holidays because that would admit to a greater investment in the whole sketchy affair of good cheer and “gratitude” the holidays purportedly promote. I do prize genuine good cheer and gratitude, but enforced holiday spirit not so much.

It is common to hear this complaint–about the obligatory holiday gift buying and cookie baking and niceties that go with. Just look how thrilled most people look in the overcrowded parking lots to impossibly busy malls, stores and roadways. And yes, that seasonal depression thing is real.

Fortunately, I do not get depressed so much as annoyed, fatigued, exasperated and grumpy. And it is much better now that I have grown old and beaten up enough to have far fewer fucks to give (so happy for that current expression). My stress over getting everything done–shopping, baking, wrapping, shopping, cooking, tree-decorating, candle lighting, card-writing (yeah, who am I kidding there?), and shopping–is half of what it used to be when the kids were younger and I had more fuel to burn. 

But there is still a lot of shit to do, much more than should be done in a two-week period, one of very few, during which the nation slows down to celebrate and appreciate the goodness of life granted us by a benevolent God or universe or both. We get an entire day off–all together.

But I do not need to mention the obvious–that the consumerist hypocrisy of the holidays exhausts a very noble idea, one of good will and graciousness toward other human beings. The lost message is as much of a  shame as the squandered opportunity to wind down and rest, lost to self-induced comatose gift buying and giving many of us can neither afford nor truly relish for the sacrifice of sanity the activity steals.

I am neither a shopper nor a craft maker. Though I am a gracious gift receiver, I want for nothing that can be bought in a store or online. I am a lousy gift buyer, no imagination for it. And perhaps the traditions I have grown up with and created are far too consumer-centric. 

I regret not changing the habit in my children, who I did enjoy baking cookies for and eventually with, as well as decorating trees and lighting menorah candles, when those activities were as wondrous as the gifts wrapped in expectation. Then the holidays eked out some cheer, some joy and love, despite the heightened stress of teachers’ gifts and Christmas cards and too many gifts purchased with too little money spent in far too distant and varied places among the too stressed and sick throngs.

So, as I sit here in a momentarily near vacant store two days before Christmas Eve, watching the rain, thinking about the gifts I still have to buy (have not started actually) and the dinner I have to cook in a couple of days that I have not planned yet, and the entertaining I have to do the following day and the day after, I audibly sigh the sound drowned out by the “Happy holidays!” a customer chirps as he walks out the door. Ugh! 

I truly want everyone around me near and far, known and unknown, to have a happy holiday and new year, to find peace and love and happiness, but I just have to figure out another way to express it.

 

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A Conversation

 
 
“When are you getting your Christmas bonus?”

“This week, like I told you.”

“Do you know which day this week?”

“Can you give me break?!! I’m sick and you’re pressuring me for money!”

“I asked a reasonable question. You need to get a grip. Just say you don’t know if you don’t.”

Dialogues go like this sometimes in long-term relationships. And it is hard to imagine that the speakers still love each other. “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” Strother Martin says in Cool Hand Luke.

Lurking behind this simple conversation lies fear, frustration and comfort. The backstory is the whole story because the front story makes little sense. One world colliding with another, each orbiting a separate sun. 

HE awoke sick at a time far too stressful to be sick, the holidays. And SHE asked a simple question at the wrong time, when HE was off to work feeling like shit. SHE asks, unsuspecting of the pending attack awaiting a target, for what gives him a great deal of stress and frustration: not enough money earned from working a demanding job HE detests when so sick. 

Her voice–after so many, many years–triggers both irritation and security, a safety net landing when all of the rest of it, everything else dissatisfies, falls down or short. SHE provides both acceptance and provocation. HE depends on her loving him warts and all. And so HE abuses with abandon with cutting words never sliced into another human being. And SHE abides, knowing that tests far greater than this one have passed, their history too deep. Until SHE turns tables on him.
 

http://www.en.wikipedia.org

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Happy Thanksgiving!

  

Once again, just like the last ten or more years, I got to host Thanksgiving dinner for my loud, wacky family, both immediate and extended. I spend days cooking and cleaning for this event, pulling a 14 hour day of non-stop cooking, serving and cleaning today. And the clean up will not be done for another couple of days, maybe three or four dishwasher loads on top of a few sink loads of dishes by hand and dismantling the serpentine table and chair arrangements wending through the dining and living areas. This year there were thirty of us, including the usual stranger who has no place to go for Thanksgiving. I am proud of my family members for offering a spot at our table–and there is always one or two each year. I love my family. They’re good people.

I have the great good fortune to belong to a family that can gather once or twice a year like this and break bread together, catch up on lives, loves and laughs. I take great care to provide them with a memorable meal and gathering, cooking two turkeys, one barbecued and one roasted, accompanied by apple-leek stuffing and cider gravy, the butternut apple cider soup they all love and rave about all year long, and pumpkin pie from scratch. And everyone else brings the wonderful sides: mashed and sweet potatoes, fresh asparagus in butter sauce, fresh cranberry sauce, honey baked ham (Dad doesn’t care for turkey), root vegetable medley, and pies, lots of pies. We love our tradition, and these foods make up our tradition no matter who has been added or subtracted from our gathering.

Though she stays in the back room now, unaware that her entire beloved family that she grew and raised and helped raise, my mom is still with us bodily, and sometimes mentally. But I am hopeful she knows with some other part of herself that we are here, senses it deep within her neurons, some vibrations. And I am so grateful to have her, have them, and have all that I have. I truly won the lottery. I hope I never take that for granted. 

Peace and love to you and yours,

Gaze

 

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Dualities not Duels

 
 

“Again, you know I don’t judge; I respect your relationship. I’m never here to tear you or J down. Who am I to do more than put myself in your place–even as I am merely me–and wonder? That’s all. I imagine your life in my body and mind. It does not work that way, but I cannot help but do it. You know I love you.”

“I do.” ((hugs))

“Drink up. I have to go back to work.”

While driving back to work, my thoughts cycle. 

“The shape of our relationships doesn’t differ much–this duality that appears like incompatability to those on the outside.”

You and I, you see, are so different, from such different worlds, you the straight and me the curvy, you the narrow and me the expansive. You like yours and I prefer mine. You know you’re right and I constantly doubt. To you, absolutes are real. To me, most everything is relative to time, place, and circumstance. You see global, while I see local, though sometimes we switch sides, me going long term and you going short. In the ven diagram, we intersect at the sliver overlap of our two circles. We meet in a horizontal world without borders, boxed and invisible, dimmed before each other, not in full light. Perhaps we must, or see the impossibility of us and kill the thrill. And yet, that divide, that delusion of polarity, opposition and contrariness keeps us interested, coming back for more. N’est ce pas?



 

credit: http://www.intermissionbristol.co.uk

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You Once Told Me…

  
“No doubt,” you say, “that I prefer fantasy to reality. The lovers I adore are distant, physically and emotionally circumscribed by intimate unavailability. I love married or gay men or women most.”

I nod in agreement. 

“I require so much space. Who is it that needs so much that is not there? Possibility is my lover, potential my partner. Otherwise, people bore as much as they excite. Those poles–like hot and cold, boredom and excitement–exist elsewhere too, you know, some other place and circumstance like thunder storms and endless sunny days, or the laughter and terror of loving daughters.”

I nod again and consider how I love my own. 

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