Billet-doux

Dear Past Love --

This day, you came to my house after school. I don't remember what we did (probably made-out to a heavy-petting motor ballad) or if we said anything different or out of the ordinary. I know that I had to have smiled at you when you kissed me goodbye and I know that I handed you the sun to keep until the next day. But you went w/ my sun and it shattered into a million glistening shards of golden resin on the silver rails of the Lauderdale County train tracks. "Journey's end in lovers meeting" is the title of that percipient day, where the day lost its sunshiny demeanor to a clamoring void. That day we sort of became undone, our serendipity, like a lovelorn leaf ripped of a tree. And it left me feeling unseated on my knees after a twelve-paced duel. Since you've been gone, I haven't held my breath, but I've felt the ligature of outstretched shadows, where headstones lived dark, like haunting monasteries on the walls.

I can't begin to tell you why you were here or what your legacy is. I could selfishly say you were here, not to touch the earth but to touch me, that you must've been born for me, that you were made for me. But that would be me falsifying some bigger truth I'm sure, bearing false witness to your memory. I could tell you that I've changed for the better, that it propelled me into some cathartic change, that I grew from your absence. You'd have to ask for a show of miscellaneous hands there. But I can affirm and tell you that I was suffused in melancholic alibis and I wrote things of earnest despair for a while, because my self-induced perdition was persistent, in the amplified mourning or at the tumultuous end of night, vivified in about seventeen death poems a day I would guess, consumed by ineffable mannerisms of sadness. And I can tell you that my reliquary was filled w/ rueful darkness. Like this:

From darkness to darkness
my voice echoes
in the emptiness
trying to find its way

From world to world
my voice cries
for life
w/ death
lurking to prey

From light to light
my voice chants
with fear
hoping darkness
leaves me

From east to west
my voice travels
in many directions
hoping to be found

From life to death
my voice reigns confusion
wondering
which is better

From me to you
my voice falls silent
again
(1989)

Over time, in a deserted mirror, I found me, under a moonlit charade. And I suppose some age-old adage applied because I learned to not ignore love and life, because even the vulnerable clouds became studded w/ jewels. I learned to embrace it daringly and to stand in its crossfire because it was always in my face and I found myself good at it. Wholly and effortlessly. Not tramp-like, not easy, not immature-like, not free to everyone but without erect walls and without hesitation. I stopped dwelling in the habit of losing people and I stopped passing out untruthful gambits that denied love's existence. I stopped visiting the orchard of dancing silhouettes.

But I still like to be alone because the quiet swales I swim in enhance my madcap escape to a copse of dreamy isolation, where the leaden silence is instilled and where my youthful regrets w/ you probably equal that of every other flower petal pulled. I wish I had said something different that day, something more or real or knowing or believable. But if it's all the same, as poignant as I can be now, I suppose you knew I loved you innocently. First & forever. And, by the wave of God's whisper, I suppose you know I miss you.
m.