Me Myself

I start myself.
I stop myself.

I’m not myself.

I find myself.

I lose myself.

I’m not myself.

I catch myself.

I throw myself.

I’m not myself.

I begin myself.

I end myself.

I’m not myself,

Just not myself.

Photo courtesy of http://www.red-letterimaging.com/

This guy's really good!



Quiet Wars (Part 3)

            So, trusting each other to expect more from themselves, each lead lives of the suffocating silence that liberated them.

            His solitude was real and almost complete as he went through the motions of life.  He ate, showered, mowed the lawn and read in the company of only his dog, Dave.

            Her solitude was much more select and stole in at times when her husband was out or sleeping and the responsibilities of running a household were discharged.  These moments came and she was as alone as him or anyone.  Perhaps more so because the lonely moments were so arbitrary and she was so unprepared.  She knew a full and wonderful life that was somehow still not complete.  Why else would the silence become so loud so suddenly?  Why could she never see it coming?

            They’d both been through the whole thirty-something, “Who am I and how did I get here and is this who I want to be when I grow up?” thing.  He’d pretty much ignored it because life was a party then.  Money and booze and women came and went faster than he could have ever kept up with even if he’d cared.  Every so often he’d get bored and that discontent would try to settle in.  But back then he thought that there was nothing in the world that another beer and another random woman didn’t fix.   

            But her?  She’d struggled mightily, wallowing in the hole in her life’s meaning.  Eventually, banged up and muddy and bloody with doubt, she’d focused on the “important” things- faith, family, career- and pulled herself back from the depths with a resolve that only occasionally felt like resignation.  But lately faith had failed her, family was faltering and career had turned into a game played by those with too much to prove.  Still, however, the laser focus on being who she’d decided to be remained the source of her calm intensity.  She was only vaguely aware that she’d assumed this air of not quite grim determination. 

Somewhere Between

I raise you up, and build high for you, for me,

            a private pedestal.

I raise you up and am bewildered

                        by your shimmering symmetry.

            Too much comes from you,

                        emergent Mediterranean muse.

                        You sear to scar what

                        no longer lies hidden.

            My child mind that knew not need

                        never again will roam, run in spring slick grass,

                        or float slow streams or lie lazy in fields

                        to see rabbits or robins form from fat cloud clusters.

I raise you up and subtly you slay the boy within,

            the one without want.   

I drag you down and born is

            a man, a man that sees

                        not your sea or stars or daunting dark dawn.

I drag you down and my vile eye

            catches an olive sigh of skin caressed curve.

I drag you down and bare your dusky body beneath me,

            devouring you with sweat and saliva and clawing want,

            seizing your siren’s soft center of my sin.

I drag you down, feed my need,

            And linger lost,

                        knowing nothing

                        but this newborn beastly being.

I live for you, my captor queen,

            I lust for you, my moaning whore,

I live inside a world between,

            That leaves me dreams of so much more.

Quiet Wars (Part 2)

            So that beautiful and amazing part came early. But before, with others, it had never seemed to stay. A friend had once told him that it simply couldn’t last and gave a few of what he thought were good reasons.  Reasons? Or rationalizations? Did it really make any difference? Hell, this guy was the most rational person he knew, an engineer. What could he expect?

            But they were rationalizations and not reasons and it makes a difference.  The guy spoke of the amount of energy needed to sustain that kind intensity and how no one could keep it up for an extended time.  It was as if he was talking gas mileage or nuclear fission or fusion or whatever the hell makes a star burn.

            Burn out or fade away. Were those the only choices? Whatever. Whichever.

            But he had a real problem with seeing it the same way as what his friend referred to as “the physics of energy conservation”. He knew nothing like this was so simple. Even physics has its quarks. No one’s ever seen, weighed, or measured one of these sub-atomic fairies.  But assume, just for a moment that they exist, just believe in them, and all at once a lot of things start making sense where they didn’t before.

            So surely, by her very nature, or his perception of her nature, there must be something here to which the rules don’t apply. She was always in the periphery and only occasionally did she mount her serene attacks into his center, softly dominating him despite his intimate knowledge of what he couldn’t know. 

            She did it the same way every time. In the midst of a turbulent day, a calm would descend, intrude and force him to stop. And before he saw her, before he smelled her, he knew. Placid waves swept and broke and penetrated with silent, invisible power.

            They were careful never to give a sign, the slightest hint, that there was anything. They knew it was there and knew that giving it voice, giving it any acknowledgement, would cheapen it. Better to have killed it outright than turned it into something less than it was. 

            It was beautiful, searing and crystalline only as long as it breathed in silence. But give it voice, release it from solitude’s vacuum, and it would become something common and sullen and devoid of mystery or beauty or honor, ugly even. If ever spoken it would be nothing more than a married woman’s emotional affair.