We shake hands to show we come unarmed.
We kiss to prove our bona fides,
to smell each other’s fear,
and know it for what it is.
I spent so long convincing myself
there were substitutes that would suffice.
Metaphors built with such elegance
they could take the place of the concrete.
Letters for whispers, spaces for breaths, windows as doorways.
I constructed the most opulent of follies,
when what I really wanted was your sticky flesh.
The touch that conquers the poverty of language.
The eye that meets the eye, the gaze that leaves nowhere to hide,
the fierce exposure of all the things we hide from strangers.
How absurdly vain I was to imagine I had escaped
the imperative of blood and skin and bone.
And how cruel you were to let me think I could.
And so this is where we say goodbye
in this fragile and faltering house of cards.
Having pushed desire through the eyes of a needles
and watched strands of nonsense snake out the other side.
This hateful summer palace of see-through dreams
has sheltered us for as long as it can.
It cannot house my hunger any longer
or keep you safe from what is base in me.
If I cannot have you
then I shall pull the house
down around our heads
in a blind and raging desolation.
That is an act of destruction
I know you can comprehend.
xo
Stunning, gorgeous, and so desolate
RG,
‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;’
This fine poem seeks to state the opposite, but does it, for me, the very desolation affirm John Donne’s sentiment to be true.
Warm hugs,
Paul.
No you’re quite right. It does indeed affirm, even if only ironically.
RG …
This poem touched places in my being that I thought were so well hidden.
The pulls and tugs of rhyme and reason constantly fighting with wishes, hopes and dreams.
Is it really sealed inside.. these feelings of what one is?
Or is it an illusion we wrap our imaginings around, hoping for the day our fairy tale can live happily ever after?
Sometimes, reality hits its mark and we hold our breath and jump. If this is a personal musing, dear RG… I wish you the power to heal quickly.
Thank you. I don’t think you actually heal from things like this. I think you carry it for a long, long time. I never fall out of love with people. They just lodge under the skin and make me lumpy.
Yes.. I agree completely. Once you give a piece of your heart, you are forever linked in my opinion.
What I am actually wishing for you, RG, is for the scab to seal quickly. You know the one… that crusty thing that we try to avoid picking at. In the beginning, it seems as if it will never go away.
But eventually, it does recede into our skin to take up permanent residence as a warm memory.
Eventually.
There are times when to escape is not possible. Crushingly and bleakly lucid.
“the touch that conquers the poverty of language”.. simply divine.
oh so piercingly apt!