Heard your voice tonight, by accident. How long has it been, two, three years? I admit something is still there, but I don't know what it is. Others would say unresolved conflict, as though conflict needs to be resolved in order for resolution to exist. Feelings, many know it to be, and maybe there are correct. But maybe they mistake this for force of habit, a mannerism no longer with a context, signifier without a signified; a dead sign. Who could blame them? The face brings the habit, and with the habit the feelings, or the habit of feeling, when seeing her face, hearing her voice. The past pulls itself back urging you to feel love as you had then, pulling itself closer to you, more habits resurfacing the closer it gets. "This is the face you love, the face you see when you love," it says. Maybe because you've never hurt me that I'm more susceptible to returning to old habits. But I've learned not to live the past in the present. I'm not exhuming a corpse, however beautifully preserved. What if you never died? What if you only waited for me until it was right? But, in the beginning, why did you even wait, if you had the chance? I know this is not the right line of reasoning, though this is a very enticing, tempting one. This one is the easy way out. How do I write a love poem now? Geez.

Hoping to end this summer with a love poem. It's been long since I've written a legitimate one, a poem which, from beginning to end, presents a relation, and at the end the relation is same, though changed. For instance, desire begins utterance, and ends it. What happens in between, and what causes desire to silence itself? A love poem should not only woo, but gaze. It should not only sing, but know when to keep silent. Silence begins when the gaze is attempted, when touch is felt. When our words begin to move us to love. A love poem is preparatory, and the result of reading one should be action, or active restraint, because sometimes love means not doing anything. It should not be something which one wishes to read to another, but something which pushes one to speak truthfully. It should be the path to the heart, and not the heart itself. A love poem must empower us to know that the risk of speaking truthfully is innate in love, and when one actually speaks from the heart, one has already let go of fear and of uncertainty. One has already risked; one is loving.

Far into the night, I could hear our feet wading
through the stream, soft enough that we hear
crickets’ long drone, and the rustling of leaves.

Sometimes, I could feel something calling me
through the marsh. Far into the night,
I begin to believe it is my own voice:

It is me I am wanting to return. Or it is me
I am wanting to be found. It is fall,
and the leaves have begun settling

on the dirt paths that the new moon bathes.
And we have left thinking something is
going our way, who, like us, are trying

to be found, to settle down. The footsteps
marking these paths look like scars
which only sleep and the silence of an open space

can mend. Maybe that is what we are
trying to find: the ancient roots of a tree
to hide us, so we may hear nothing

but the beating of the earth, where we wait
for the wind to blanket us with snow
and dreams, where we wake, far

into life, still lost, but rested.

Fears

This blog is like my little cave, my little hole-in-the-wall where I'm supposed to say what I want. But there are too many personal things I never say, even to people I have confidence in. As I'm writing this, I'm beginning to feel the therapeutic effect of blogging (a kind of catharsis, a purging of self, something I've last done in high school), sort of releasing everything into this entry, my quiet fears. My craft is failing. My art cannot keep up with the insights of my mind, and I cannot fashion what strikes me as beautiful into something beautiful. For the past few days, I've felt a falling out (with people, places, dreams, etc) which I fear may be permanent. What I have to say, and I'm saying this in confrontation with myself, is that I fear, during law school, or even after, that my writing will never return to me the way certain persons will never return to me. I am dying. I will die earlier than what is expected of me. I will not be remembered. Creative writing as a form of mitigating my neurosis, I fear, is being replaced with the power I can garner through law (when I know that the illusion of power does not erase the fact of death). Which leads me to confess: I write to be remembered. I do not believe in God. The universe is beautiful, but all I have are my words. There is nothing to see here, always nothing to see (and this I hope to change with writing; I hope to be seen; I'm a very stubborn person and you can't fucking change this about me.). Experience tells us there is no love, only angst, only revolution. Experience tells me that there is no more happily ever after because Satan has fallen out of grace. I will never be able to love again because I think too much (which is a fuckload better), and this is my only blessing. Thought is the salvation of the thinker/poet as well as his/her disorder. And poetry is the easiest and cheapest therapy there is.