Acceptance

[mrpaulie]

Laurie always told us in class that every single word has to be deliberate. I agree. Unfortunately, sometimes what we're saying very deliberately only comes through to us. Oh well. Just toss what seems to me to be a far too blatant title and switch some wording around the way the people in class liked it. Spend 2 hours stressing over the slowly dwindling meaning of the poem, get distracted by thoughts of the girl you wrote it about, decide that nobody ever really understood Whitman in his time either so it's not like it really matters anyway, change a few more things, decide to keep one line nobody else liked because you like it, and there's a poem.

acceptance

You need it
like you’ve never needed anything before,
like this one thing is the culmination of you,
the response to your incessant calls,
the line between your dots.

So you seek it in all the usual places.

And you find it in the crush of flesh,
the bend of careless limbs entwined,
the call of the here and the now,
the giving in for the sake of taking.

You’ll never be ready for this;
aren’t prepared for it to play out,
for what it’ll do to your flesh,
how it will warp your soul.
You’ll find it and take it and still
you’ll never be quite ready.

This is the way your world ends,
not with a whimper but with a bang.