Dreams and poetry
Tonight I dreamed that I was in a music store. When I was about to pay for my two or three CD’s, the cashier noticed there was something wrong with my Visa card - it didn’t have my real name on it, but my YouTube user name. *lol*
He said: “You know, real life is not the same as what’s happening on the internet. You could get in trouble for this.” I was just confused and didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, but he was so serious and told me that I needed to get my facts straight and decide what’s real and not. “It’s okay to think that some guys are hot and have fantasies and say that you’re bisexual when you are online. But what about real life?!”
Well, I woke up before I could think of a way to respond to that. I don’t know, I just want to tell my brain to give me a break. Can’t I please just let it go and not have these thoughts even in my sleep?! Maybe the dream was trying to tell me something I should already know, that I’m wasting my time with useless thoughts? But there’s some stubborn, unreasonable part of me that doesn’t want to accept what that cashier guy was implying.
The poet Karin Boye (1900-1941) has written a lot of poems about unrequited love (and some about mutual love) that I’ve had plenty of reason to strongly identify with over the years. I’ve often felt that she describes my own feelings spot-on. All or most of her poems are written about women. (But they were written and published in a time when it wasn’t okay to say so openly; I think it’s very possible also for straight people to identify with her words about the pain - and sometimes, the joy - of being in love.) Also, according to her biography, she only ever fell in love with and had relationships with women, except for a brief marriage with a male friend. They divorced after she had spent some time in Berlin, where she came to terms with her sexuality. During a lot of her life, she found it hard to accept her attraction to women (especially when she was a young Christian), and in my eyes, this marriage looks like an attempt to “live straight.”
There is only one poem, as far as I know, where the addressee is obviously a man (because the poem says so). This poem describes the stars in the night sky in the spring time, how they are “like living creatures”, “ripe” and “swelling”; they want to fall, naked, to create life… It’s a cute and non-explicit but still almost too sensual poem (I doubt I could read it aloud without blushing) about being painfully, frustratingly horny (or that’s how I read it), and the last lines of the poem: “man approved by the stars, shake a fruit in my womb!”
In my opinion, this poem always seemed to stand out among the others, because even if the other poems aren’t explicitly about women, this is the only one that is explicitly heterosexual in nature. (It was written before her marriage… and there were never any “fruits”.) But I feel that I get it now. Even if I’m just reading things into it.
Not that that’s an answer to anything.
Speaking of stars… I have watched the first episode of This Star’s Love, about a single mother of three. She meets a younger man with amnesia and decides to let him believe he’s her husband. Her older kid doesn’t like him because he still longs for his real dad but the youngest one can’t remember their dad so he’s super happy. The middle child is just confused. And I don’t know, there’s something charming and cute about it all, and so far I don’t feel like it’s so over the top hysterical that it could be.
He said: “You know, real life is not the same as what’s happening on the internet. You could get in trouble for this.” I was just confused and didn’t understand why it was such a big deal, but he was so serious and told me that I needed to get my facts straight and decide what’s real and not. “It’s okay to think that some guys are hot and have fantasies and say that you’re bisexual when you are online. But what about real life?!”
Well, I woke up before I could think of a way to respond to that. I don’t know, I just want to tell my brain to give me a break. Can’t I please just let it go and not have these thoughts even in my sleep?! Maybe the dream was trying to tell me something I should already know, that I’m wasting my time with useless thoughts? But there’s some stubborn, unreasonable part of me that doesn’t want to accept what that cashier guy was implying.
The poet Karin Boye (1900-1941) has written a lot of poems about unrequited love (and some about mutual love) that I’ve had plenty of reason to strongly identify with over the years. I’ve often felt that she describes my own feelings spot-on. All or most of her poems are written about women. (But they were written and published in a time when it wasn’t okay to say so openly; I think it’s very possible also for straight people to identify with her words about the pain - and sometimes, the joy - of being in love.) Also, according to her biography, she only ever fell in love with and had relationships with women, except for a brief marriage with a male friend. They divorced after she had spent some time in Berlin, where she came to terms with her sexuality. During a lot of her life, she found it hard to accept her attraction to women (especially when she was a young Christian), and in my eyes, this marriage looks like an attempt to “live straight.”
There is only one poem, as far as I know, where the addressee is obviously a man (because the poem says so). This poem describes the stars in the night sky in the spring time, how they are “like living creatures”, “ripe” and “swelling”; they want to fall, naked, to create life… It’s a cute and non-explicit but still almost too sensual poem (I doubt I could read it aloud without blushing) about being painfully, frustratingly horny (or that’s how I read it), and the last lines of the poem: “man approved by the stars, shake a fruit in my womb!”
In my opinion, this poem always seemed to stand out among the others, because even if the other poems aren’t explicitly about women, this is the only one that is explicitly heterosexual in nature. (It was written before her marriage… and there were never any “fruits”.) But I feel that I get it now. Even if I’m just reading things into it.
Not that that’s an answer to anything.
Speaking of stars… I have watched the first episode of This Star’s Love, about a single mother of three. She meets a younger man with amnesia and decides to let him believe he’s her husband. Her older kid doesn’t like him because he still longs for his real dad but the youngest one can’t remember their dad so he’s super happy. The middle child is just confused. And I don’t know, there’s something charming and cute about it all, and so far I don’t feel like it’s so over the top hysterical that it could be.