The concept of "complicated grief"

According Rob Stein of the Washington Post, “One of the hallmarks of complicated grief is a persistent sense of longing for the lost one and a tendency to conjure up reveries of that person.”

Non-Profit Love [draft]

Celebrating my 100th post! Let me shoot out something from the heart....

Non-Profit Love

They don’t ask for much, when they ask for love.

It’s just one obvious thing, really.

Their romance is a cocktail of flirtation, passion, desire, and eternal willingness to make it survive.

Survival is key.

A person in non-profit love will do and give everything in their power (and even those not in their power) to believe the love promised, is received.

They wait by the mailbox for their promised package to arrive;

They are willing to drive to the post office if the carrier didn’t find them home;

They are even willing to fly to the place of origin and avoid the sender spending on postage.

A person requesting a non-profit love doesn’t ask for much

And is willing to do the work of both people as long as they’re promised what they so desperately want.

This person stares at unreasableness and impossibility dead in the eyes, but still manages to rescue hope and possibility;

They see a crashing plane and still desire to buy a ticket.

These are the most selfless (masochist) people just behind traveling nuns and members of the Peace Corps.

I’ll give my blood, my marrow, or my entire heart, if it’s asked of me.

They are like soldiers in a way,

But instead of a country,

Their loyalty is to a human being that you will never see;

Their devotion is to a human being that will give no profit of love.

These are the bravest and most selfless people alive

Because they willingly go into a burning building they know they won’t escape from.

They don’t ask for much, when they ask for love.

It’s just one obvious thing, really.

But sadly, they never receive it.

Destitute of Vision (draft)

"Hey, do you see that?"
"What, where?"
"Over there!"
"WHERE?!"
"There!"
"......I dont see it."
"Oh my god."

This is the type of moment that historically happens maybe once or so in your life.
You usually remember big moments like these
for the rest of your life.
They mark you like the bulgy scars of a massive cut to the epidermis.
This is a time when you look and you look and you just don't see.
You're unseeing; you're sightless; you're visionless.

They tell you the devil is among the crowd, and you don't see him.
You expect red, flames, hooves and a whole lot of evil painted on his ruby face.
But you see a random group,
not much different from what every random group looks like.

And then something happens--
maybe brought on from exhaustion by staring so long.
Confusion melts off of your expression like a wax face staring a hot sun.
And suddenly-- you realize that the devil looks just like you and me;
And you see him.
Maybe you will yourself so much to see it that you eventually do;
just like when they say that if you're depressed and smile hard enough
you start to believe that you're happy.
So you see him, and he's hideous.
It makes you wish you never saw him and would have done anything to pretended
to tell your friend you saw it, even though you didn't.
And the devil is neither red nor on fire.
He is wearing regular clothes,
like the ones on your back and mine.
How could one of our own be responsible for so many terrible things?
It almost seems inhuman.

(written 9/19/12 from 9:00pm-9:52pm)

Is it Time? (draft)

There is a battle between my comfortable present
and the mysteriously spontaneous future.
It's the never ending struggle between hesitation and feeling ready.
Because we are always ready, we just need to will towards it.
But is it time?
One decision, accompanied by a bit of courage and luck,
can bring about a new world; a new me; a new mess of things.
That last sigh before the plunge is the most suffocating and scares me.
But what if that last breath is really the last one, ever?
Face that reality, despite the fear that precedes it! I say.
Stop! I also say.
Who do I listen to?
Where do I begin?
Where does the energy come from to will my foot forward against gravity?
Is it Time?

Not So Far from Leaving the Same Ol' Lament, Thanks Tracy

[One of the more depressing pieces I've written in years... beware of the dark morbid factor.] 10:35pm

Sometimes I think and feel that maybe I was made for a small town.
Sometimes among the laughter I feel a bit alien;
a bit of a crooked piece from some other puzzle.
I can imagine the tears, the heartsickness
if I were to pick up and... go.
But regardless, I know, that in the end, its always going to be OK.

And maybe I want to run away because of you;
maybe I know that I can't detach your memory unless
I detach from everything and start anew.
I want a blank slate I can recreate memories with different people,
different places,
different reasons why I laughed,
different reasons why I cried,
and different reasons to remember.

 Tracy seems to know the theme song that my heart and brain are dancing to.
She knows too much-- so much,
its embarrassing.
Stop saying the words I can't say;
Stop feeling the feelings I ignore.

Some people feel that alcohol helps them forget,
but I'm so stern and reserved that it actually helps me feel something
and express what sobriety never could-- and lies about.
 And it all starts pouring out like some overfilled pot
that desperately attempts to minimize the damage of a leaky roof.
Then all the words like polyamorous float on the water
as the knots in my throat get tighter and tighter,
and I lose the feel of breath in my throat.
"And is that what we go through this for?" Tracy said.
Just make it stop.

10:51pm

Let my worries desintigrate in the airless-black that is, space.

"Sometimes you have to build a wall to protect yourself because the impact [of an event] may actually destroy you." - DMX's wife.

Loving the Alien [Revision]

This is the rawest piece my brittle fingers have carved on paper.
For at 51 years of age, and only at 51, did I dare return to this place.
And it comes from a hole in my jigsaw coeur*
that was taught to fall apart, put itself back together again,
and patch itself up,
time after time after time
at the thought of a memory
that hole-punched me like like a child's art project.
This is about a love that's alien; a type not yet defined.
About a thing I loved to the point of dying
just to wait on the other side of life for it,
which would be less painful
than waiting for it here.
Because what its all come down to now
is the lack of everything
and consequently having obtained nothing.
At times, when I sat and thought about it,
my fingers, now old, felt the tingling desire to run
down its back as if in a marathon in slow motion.
And at other times I wanted to wrap them around it,
in a prison-hug that is as inescapable as Alcatraz.

Long ago, I ventured to the deepest darkest skies above us.
It was a voyage recalled to this day, still,
which expanded the knowledge of human kind
about the mysteries foreign to Earth.
And among heroic routine,
I broke myself away from our vessel, unnoticed.
I swam through the space oddity, fearless,
to the point of being one second away from being permanently lost in space.
As I broke myself free from matter,
I saw it.

It caused such a commotion in my body
and felt like an immovable seizure.
Though surely, being in space I knew I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
It was a mixture of what I call "the double f's:"
fright and fascination,
which fell over me like a warm waterfall,
for it looked at me just as I looked at it.
It was as accepting of me as I was of it.
And it almost broke me to tears,
realizing that no human ever looked at me
with such sincerity in the eyes (as big and beautiful as they were) as it did.
We were two beings. We were two.
One for each other, then each other as one.
I could see it accept with a slow yet voracious veracity,
waiting for me to reinforce that feeling.
This reaction was not the norm for either one.
Whether I was in a trance, or experiencing the purest emotion
I have ever felt,
I felt that it didn't know
what discrimination or being judgemental was.
So naturally, I fell in love with it
as it cleared the slate for me.

We embraced with an odd sensation of homely peace;
The kind of peace people wish for the world, our world;
The kind that innocent children feel,
only there was no ignorance here,
no naïvety.

I allowed myself to be sucked in
to the black holes that were its eyes.
And for the first time on my voyage,
or in my life,
I was completely lost
and wanted to stay lost,
for being lost never felt so good.
And I thought to myself:
If this is what people feel when they cry out of happiness,
then may I carry the Earth's oceans in my eyes.
And I squeezed my eyes with the force of Hercules
to trap the oceans within me,
attempting to hold the moment still, very still.

I felt the rubbery hands embrace my flesh.
But after that pleasant darkness,
which had cascaded over my body like a satin veil,
I opened my eyes
and found myself on the opposite side of the glass again,
trapped, and away from it
as if it was all just the cruelest of daydreams.

I was being restrained.
Among the chaotic voices and movements around me,
my face was expressionless
but adorned with the salty drops of the oceans I had held within,
which were now leaking out of my dream and my eyes.
Ultimately, among my grief I realized it was gone;
We were gone.

My vessel descended, unimaginably, away from it,
and I snapped back to the cruel light of the ordinary
where the years go by like water in a river:
insignificant, unimportant, and unmissed.

Since then, I've felt a depressing ecstasy
that has lasted an infinity of years,
even longer than the years I've been alive.
I know this encounter
was coincidental as it was great.
But I'm as thankful as I feel cursed
that I know pureness existed,
though in another world and another time.
The combination of events
will never repeat and bring me back to it.
And the most painful thing,
is accepting that it was the only thing that ever existed
that truly acted as a human being should.

*Coeur: "Heart" in French.

...because of a Letter to Hermione

[inspired by "Letter to Hermione" by David Bowie"

I pushed up against your skin
until we almost fused together like sand to glass.
But my skin just rubbed off
exactly where you touched me,
and you were more polished than ever.
Shine on.

My letters met your voice somewhere along the way,
and crashed like planets confused in orbit,
but nevertheless suffering a silent war in that empty universe that was "our life."
As a result I learned that ink never means as much to the ear as it does to the hand
and reached nirvana.

Now I feel as awkward as I probably did at birth;
ripped from the ultimate utopia.
I sought southern comfort to make the newness (the rawness) OK;
I dug in deeper; I'd rather feel lost and confused.
I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do
because I've never seen you like this before.
And consequently, I've never seen me
see you like this before.