What is there to lose?
Rueful and sheepish, I am when it comes to a dialogue where you are the central character. I remember distinctly how you uncorked the bottle to have laughter and words spill out, unbridled, instead of wine. We laughed and laughed some more, exchanging our versions of sadness. Or something like that. After sifting through each other's shit, what did we talk about? Nothing much. But always, some sort of insight was gleaned through the labyrinth of innuendo and allusion.
"How ironic."
"Irony is sexy."
"How can you say such a thing? Feigned ignorance is condescending."
"Now that is condescending. But to be strikingly unaware of say, beauty or one's apparent coolitude? Now that is sexy."
"I get you."
"I know you do."
And for a moment, it felt like everything was right in the world.
Alike in our differences, the night offered an overwhelming sense of being overtaken by joy. It was as if the city and night and you and I, midst a wave of people, were united in a kind of profound identity.
So I plummeted, reveled in that lighted moment, when we seemed to understand ourselves and the world and, for a single instant, knew the loveliness of living beings.
But the moment vanished quickly, and we are almost embarrassed to admit that it has ever been, as though in doing so we betray a willingness to believe in what is not true ---
Because
there are those who cannot reconcile
how joy may come
from where we do not run from life,
from where we learn to break out of the prison of self.
Because
some find it strange how
perhaps joy is most likely to come
when we forget ourselves in service,
or in the pursuit of a great dream.
Because
most fail to understand how
we are most likely to experience moments of joy
if we can admit that there is more to life
than we have yet fathomed.
And because
we refuse to consider how
moments of deep exaltation are born out of
uncertainty and challenge and peril;
how we are blind
that there in the universe is light,
a stuff,
a tissue,
a substance
in company with which one would never be lonely.
Noon
I keep to the shade, quiet places where I can sip my coffee and look at the world. You bask in the sunlight, always in a flurry of activity, paddles untucked, never at one place at one time. You wear your heart in the outer folds of your sleeve, sometimes in your back pocket or at the tip of your nose but always where everyone can see it. I have kept mine hidden in my cobwebbed cage of blood and bone, only to claw its way out when you revealed yourself to me. It's been somewhere since, never within my reach, enjoying this cruel game of hide and seek.
To be continued...
Night
Cont.
I stay cocooned in my nest surrounded by people made out of paper while you keep to dancing lights and the haze of smoke.
Be that as it may
You and I will forever
remain equals, still.
And I must say, there are things I love:
Love that we battle
in secret, drawing our swords of
prose and poetry.
How you challenge me
to say the least, more
than I do myself.
Yet the question still stands: What is there to lose?
Say I lost my heart
somewhere in the folds of your skin.
Say you chanced upon it
would you, would you
consider keeping it?
