She didn’t love me
the way I needed…
The way I wanted to be loved.
She couldn’t.
Didn’t have the ability.
She could if she changed.
But she won’t change.
That would take too much
work, vulnerability, and humility.
So she deludes life and
eschews love.
She doesn’t care.
There are a lot of other people
who live like her.
Likely someone reading this poem
right now.
I think it’s sad, but I guess
it’s really very human for people
to be afraid of change,
and afraid of love.
To love is to risk losing love
or risk not receiving love.
I’ll take that risk.
And I’m proud I will.
Tag: divorce
It’s a scary thing to admit,
maybe a scary thing to feel,
although physically, it feels
really good to get there.
Often these days, very late at night,
after I’ve done like eight
or nine lines of coke,
I’m able to finally lay there and
feel calm,
feel cool,
feel loved,
forget about you,
forget who you are,
forget that you exist,
forget that you no longer love me,
and then I’m able to
dumbly, mindlessly, numbly,
fall asleep and sleep good,
sleep in peace.
People don’t typically think of
cocaine working this way
and maybe that’s why this is
scary…
that this is what it’s evolved to.
This is what love is to me now.
I won’t go there again.
I won’t.
It will be avoided.
I hate it.
I don’t like having to avoid
a place,
but I will.
The road you live on won’t
exist in my world.
I won’t go by your house
hoping and dreaming and
angry
late at night.
Looking at your window,
knowing the mass of coiled
gold hair mess behind it.
I can’t.
I’ll choose emptiness and
also fullness with strangers,
with the moonlight above
country fields near our town
cuz it is late and I’m lonely
and I drove out there to
breathe the scent of oak trees
instead.
I want your scent, body heat,
curves, accidental brush
of soft skin and your
muffled snores.
Sometimes I’ll blow coke,
lots of it,
and it will comfort me,
a hall of poets and angels
gathered.
But some other nights I won’t.
Sometimes I’ll just lay still
in my bed with the watercolor
painting of midnight on the
walls,
feel my passionate heartbeat,
strong and rigorous but also soft,
and I’ll just be still,
knowing stillness in night
while awake
is sacred.
Us ushering ourselves to the
hall of death.
I want to be tough, but more
importantly,
I want to be honest.
So I will.
That is how I’m going to live.
I opened up someone
who should not be opened up.
She’s many thousands of
years,
maybe millions of years away
from being ready to be
opened up.
But I did it anyways
cuz that’s what I do;
flippant, curious, voracious.
And light and love
came violently screaming out
of her and pouring into her.
A being misunderstanding
their self,
misunderstanding my being.
Afterwards,
the oak trees called me
to them,
asked me what I had done and
why did I do it.
I said
it was for carnal earthen reasons.
And they conveyed,
oh star stuff Nova,
you still have so many ways
to grow and so many things
to learn.
What I remember from her
is just something visceral.
Something in the body.
Raw. Ancient.
Long life. Sentient. Awake.
Star stuff.
I know we were a shitshow.
Bad words and hurtful things
said, done, and felt
to each other.
But somehow all I remember
is powerful, visceral, psychic,
physical, soulful
feelings.
Well, just a feeling.
One feeling, one unified feeling.
It feels very similar to
sunshine on your skin,
on an early October morning
in Texas,
in autumn of the northern
hemisphere
on Earth.
Do you know the feeling I’m talking
about?
When the sun touches you and
it feels your skin,
it fills your soul.
She knows I’m beautiful now.
Well, becoming more beautiful.
Though she doesn’t care anymore.
She let that kind of feeling go.
But she knows I’m having that
look these days
that others see and think
I’m a delight to look at and experience.
I might bring lust into a room.
There could be lust.
She could see my dark eyes
and my long eyelashes drawn across
the suspended air in stillness, calling
something sultry and sensual,
that dark hair majesty,
there with my cheekbones,
drawing my naughty eyes out
and shining on the naughty thoughts
of other women I see. Who go thinking.
They see me.
I’m seen.
I’m out.
It’s becoming and uncoming
in very much a way it never has before.
She knows I’m beautiful now.
But she doesn’t care anymore.
She can’t.
It would stop her world
and the kind of afternoons
she needs with herself.
I’m going to leave you
as ghosts
back there under that
moonlight.
Your lips left there
on my shoulder
drawing
your big, scared,
sacred, sensual feelings
out of you
there in that
ghostland
where I leave you.
A last time,
an eternal seance
with your feelings there,
not here,
left with the ghost life.
Witch’s word, witch’s covenant.
I step into the sunlight.
I set to write the spells in
heartbreak.
The aborted child.
The lost capitalist culture.
The absent love of parents.
The lover whose heart I broke.
The lover who broke my heart.
The abusive father.
The abusive and withholding
partner, and the anger and anxiety
lived towards them.
The two cats who revolutionized
my soul, then lived, created
something joyous,
then died and went away.
The gender I am but in some way
will never wholly be in
other people’s eyes.
The hurtful things said.
The hurtful things heard that
are never surmounted once said.
The living of self that always
carries a crushed something.
The gentle smile I still manage
in soft quiet moments
with myself very still or
across to another’s eyes
who needs my gentle smile.
But I did not write these spells
in word —
I lived and live them.
And I guess they taught and
teach me to
love and love onward
somehow,
in a lifetime, in a life form, in a life
way remade, reformed, and
even revisited.
That is their spell.
That is the spells in heartbreak.
Our emotions are full
when the moon is high.
Ripe am I
in your heart and mind.
Over the fields,
the arms of the trees,
sleeping and dreaming.
The northern skies
believe in southern breeze.
The breeze weaves and
weaves
around our bodies entwined,
but separate and solo.
Midnight is right,
the light between leaves.
You’ve awoke in the morning.
Your feelings,
so many of them
underneath the bright moon,
now clear in daylight,
together and simple.
And this is why I cast
dark pearly eyes to the sky
when you are sleeping.
I can feel a thousand lifetimes
passing through our fingers.
She is a person who would
let a thousand lifetimes
pass through her fingers;
an epoch of love and lovers,
passed over.
She’s done it before,
many times.
I’ve seen it.
And I watch it now.
That’s why I was here again,
to see if things could go
differently.
But they won’t go differently.
She’ll be in this situation again;
it may not be on Earth,
it may be as a woman or as
a man,
it may be as a mom
or as an animal,
but she’ll do this over and
over.
That’s why I leaned in to
love her.
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