I love you. I’m sorry. Whatever you’ve got to give me I’ll take it. I can’t contain my longing, my softness, my velvet, my moist. It’s just the way I was made: serious, deep, sensual, as if my insides were made of a dark-chocolate fondue fountain. Bitter yet pure, strong yet satisfying, stimulating yet warm.
I’m sorry for forgetting that life is poetry. It is ugly and beautiful and stranger than anything I could have come up with; most of my fantasies are trite and boring.
I am losing all desire to live someone else’s life, but I have spent most of my years trying to. And so, here we are. You over there and me over here trying to fall into you, but I can’t find where either of us begins nor ends. Besides, I have no legs with which to jump – I have tree trunks and a necklace of Spanish moss. And dewdrops for sisters, and mourning dove suitors that coo me to sleep under blush pink skies.
And you, you are all these and more. You are daytime and nighttime, and there is no escaping you. I’m sorry for trying, though I will try again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter. After all, the blush-pinks will always remind me that Death has the ultimate dominion. On impulse I bow feeling the soft brush of grass against my cheek, and I fill with gratitude and I still wish you loved me, ME personally, me as a breathing, living, human being.
I’m sorry, I love you. I have no choice, really. And all this stupid sadness and suffering and bullshit I am supposed to accept? For your sake – I sulk – but love it too. Not always, but mostly when I feel the poignant horribleness of a failed fledgling flight. Or the cruel grief of a human miscarriage.
When I recall the helpless sadness of watching my mother die.
When I witness the futile suffering of a friend, grinding her frazzled, mental wheels.
Why do I write these terrible things? Why do I think about them? See, I don’t will to, they come to me, unannounced. I have stopped thinking it’s abnormal. A society, on the contrary, that does not think about them, despite them happening all the time around us, seems abnormal and childish, and cowardly.
Is that too harsh a judgement on you, Perfect Love? Well, the world might be perfect, but it is not always true, and I wish more people would search for the truth in their lives. Death and suffering are very real in mine, mourning dove. That’s why I will plant sunflowers this year, and put out seeds for you and sugarwater for the hummingbirds. It’s why I linger a little longer in a human hug, a little longer under the warm sheets in the morning, with the dog at my feet.
I once wrote the following words but a loving friend called them too basic for humans who were far along on the journey of life. And yet, how many I meet who need to hear this, because it was too basic to be said by their parents and teachers, too basic for societies as complex and advanced as ours:
“This whole Life thing? It’s nothing but picking up your heart in the cup of your hands and placing it back in its nest, its rightful Home. Be gentle with yourself as you chart these uncharted waters of life, remembering that all leads to the same Earth whence our bodies came, so what’s the rush? The present moment stretches languidly from you to infinity, begging you to milk its colours with your eyes, and feel its contours with your human hands.”
How lucky I am that my ear-brain translates vibrations to melodies! Gershwin realised this when he heard in the rattle of the train against the tracks his Rhapsody in Blue. Ah, let us be gentle, then, with our humanness, which is here to transform energy to art, energy to relationship, energy to more energy, and energy to humanity.
At the end of the day, how could I not fall in love with my mere mortal bones? My ancestors have traveled many light years to be here, as me – how could I not open my eyes afresh to this utter marvel that is this configuration of cells and tissues and organs that feels and suffers intensely and consciously the pain and beauty of living?
I’m sorry, because I have left the path of the roshis behind and taken that of the poets, diving headlong into the grand bazaar of this dream and its heckling vendors, and its dead ends.
And my two shoeless, dirty feet on its narrow cobblestones.
I love you.
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