I spoke of poems I’d never write
Of ghosts that haunt in broad daylight
Like the time I kissed you silently
When you forgot you said you’d remember me.
Words that spill from a poet’s pen
Form iron links that lock you in
A heart whose walls are paper thin,
From which you leap, you’re gone again.
I find myself in darkness now…and it’s here I wish to linger. Darkness, an old friend who listens to my enlightening stories with a sardonic grin and small dagger that he slowly but deftly twirls in his fingers. He knows when to show up…when I hang the light of a beloved in the heavens, he comes and grins…and lets me continue to sing the praises. “Oh this love I’ve found…if you only knew.”
This love we emanate pales in comparison to its source within. Yet we wield the light as if we hold the eye of God. We rip open our chest and beat rays of light on everything around us. “I never felt love, until I loved her…I never knew the beauty of the moon, until my heart shown upon it… ’tis my own illumination, whose reflection I seek.”
I’m a tenant of my own heart…darkness is my neighbor on one side, light on the other. But the dark companion patronizes me…and taunts me to expend myself, “write poet, write! Cast that heavenly light on everything.” It is darkness that drives me to love myself blind – and it’s there the poet fumbles for his quill, spilling the ink reservoir all over the parchment. Darkness spreads whispers of light into the ears, but we hear with our hearts. Outside our hearts, darkness moans to enter, begs for deep and undulating penetration – to seduce its way into our hearts; but nay, not to snuff the flame within, but rather to reveal itself to itself in light. For how lonely it must be, to be darkness and never see your own reflection. How lonely to love, without another heart to at least cast back a glimpse of our own image.
We are dervishes – wanderers and aloof mystics; seeking to seduce our way into the depths of the divine. But it is the divine that seduces us. You are the wandering gypsy and vagabond, learning to love in the absence of another’s presence. I see the emerald worn in that necklace, glimmering in the dark shadows to where she sometimes retreats. It takes but a pinpoint of light to find the heavenly source.
“I want no more of this,” I once conceded…and threw up my fortresses. My hands cracking with dryness, my fingernails were laden with dirt from digging the mote around my heart, that no one would enter – and I spilled my own blood into its trenches. I took my fertility talisman up to the mouth of the volcano and threw it in with disgust. I leaned over to watch it descend into the sacrificial pyre – flames shot up, and the nuée ardente seared my eyelashes. I wanted no more of this idolatry…I’d been loving the symbol, wooing her for too long.
I’d loved everything lit by the Sun, while I lusted for a brighter star. If love is a tiger, then lust is my pacing the cage. I loved my possessions, my family, many a vagabond and gypsy – I loved myself and my God.
I loved my poetry – my beautiful poetry. Some writers court their readers – seeking not their understanding, but rather a watering eye. I wrote to be worthy of love… but not just any. Yet, I have whored myself to the masses, but being poet, a seam from my heart tore through and caught the eye of its reader, or rather, caught a glimpse of itself in the divine opening of another. God came through the emptiness – and without describable content filled my container.
