(no subject)
This is a poem I rediscovered tonight:
LOVE ME FOR THE FOOL I AM
(the laughing angel-imbecile).
The thrill
of kissing you
is seeing me
reflected in your eyes.
We try for purity
but
still
we're glorious
blobs of meat.
I worship you
like blood
or oil or wheat.
Our love is flawed
and swallowed
by the rush of time.
A mindless innocence,
they say,
is crime.
We dance on borrowed feet.
It's by Michael McClure. When I was younger, I would fill up notebooks in days, page after page. Poetry and prose and love letters I meant to send but couldn't, or forgot to, or wrote off as draft. Lists, playlists, sketches, fragments, quotes, clippings. Whatever. It's months between poems now; I don't write except for criticism, someone else. It's easy to forget that the present is just as relevent as the past, some would say more so, and forgeting that is what I'd like to do for the moment. I found those old notebooks the other day and I wanted to cry, but of course I had people coming in a bit and someplace to be, someone, et cetera. We keep old journals stashed away privately with the implicit belief that one day, when we are older and have forgiven our younger selves, we will take them out and read them, and yes we will cringe and slam our faces into our hands, but we will smile and be thankful as well. I'm glad he's out of my life, why would I think something like that, where was any sense of perspective? Et cetera.
In those old notebooks I tried to find who I used to be. Everything was holy and contingently, fleetingly sacred, beautiful. I was in love hard, and confused and excited and distracted endlessly; sober, amazed. I'm trying to remember what was holy, how I saw everything in everything and nothing in nothing. How the word plays and line breaks came so easily to me. I've been trying for a while now to figure out why I'm interested in the person I'm currently interested in, who's so different from me in almost every way, infuriating and straight up fucking mind blowing. Why I can't tear my hands away from what I keep telling myself is a train wreck already happened, ready to explode. I think I see in her who I used to be, something better that I can't be again because I can not see the truth in it anymore. I can't immerse myself in what I know to be wrong, but can I love it? Can I love it in someone else? "Existence preceeds essence": well, that is bullshit, but what does it mean to love the existence and shrink at the essence? Do I shrink at the essence?
A boy I fucked once once told me that when you love philosophy, you can't love a person: you will talk yourself out of love everytime and into a pragmatic compromise. A self-defined absurdist, I don't think he realized how ridiculous this sounded coming out of his mouth (but then everything that came out of his mouth was rather ridiculous), but I've heard it from other, better boys (and girls) I haven't fucked, and I have seen it in action and I have played the card myself, more than once, more than twice.
That's misleading, though: it's not a card to be played. It's an argument in flesh.