Love Letter to a Poet

The Guardian, Centurion, the Gestapo of my heart. She inspects all, she watches all, and rarely allows anyone to tread across the front lawn of my Heart’s Home. Her ego is slightly bruised because you snuck in when she was digging thru her purse for that ever elusive cigarette lighter.

My Heart sits in her lovely home waiting, knowing there is someone out there capable of touching her soul. Someone not afraid to dive into her world head first, undeterred, un-intimidated.

She hides scars, defects, the ugly parts, in a closet at the back of the laundry room. That dark cold room where you usually keep ancient linens and last year’s Christmas napkins. The people who come in and out of this home are sorely disappointed when they find this room, as though it were placed there conspiratorially and deceptively by The Gestapo of My Heart. It is always there, you pass it every time you go into the Laundry Room, which is often in a home like this one. Why would it be necessary to point out the obvious? My heart has better things to ponder, like how to replicate the brown of your eyes into a marvelous and lustrous paint, and what could she use that paint on?

She has no use for telling you that there is a small but significant twist to the Laundry Room Door, because you already know the trick to opening the door carefully, and it would only insult your intelligence and bruise your ego. Besides which she wants to know what you think about when you are pondering pansies. (The flowers not the weaklings.) She’s far too busy remembering the time she listened to you breathe in the pre-dawn hours of a misty morning in Spring.

It scares me that my heart actually considers examining these things about you. The Guardian is frantically pacing the perimeter, chain smoking and wringing hands. These emotions float by, and I know from experience that you will vanish into the abyss just as miraculously as you surfaced.

Twice I have loved unconditionally, and twice I was rejected. Twice I gave up my self in the name of financial security and twice I walked away in search of soul nourishment.

Ahead of All Parting. That’s the name of my favorite works on Rilke. I wonder sometimes if anyone reading that title can appreciate what it really means, what it could mean contextually. I have stayed well ahead of all my partings. I’ve been the rejecter before being rejected.   I’ve strived to no avail to be – to live up to the image he has of me, he had of me, they want of me. I have learned that remaining true to my heart, my soul, my self, always results in rejection.

I simply will not give up me to be loved by you. And so I stay ahead of the parting. We forever sit on the front porch, you forever sit on the front porch, never entering even the living room.

It has officially taken me 2 and one quarter hours to write this. How you make me struggle. How the Centurion baits me with distractions, tossing a lyric here, an image there. Any thing to stop the words from bleeding out of my mind.

The unconscious things I do ….. the subconscious decisions I make …… all designed to steer you gently away from this house, this porch, this woman ….. are completely and utterly lost, because you silently step over them or around them. You made eye contact with the girl in the house, for just a brief moment, but long enough for her to see you ….

…….. to see you.

It is not fear when I refuse to feel afraid. Does it not then follow that it is not love if I refuse to feel? And how long could I keep that charade going? Would hours bleed into weeks bleed into years ……. or does the bleeding eventually stop and I am forced to accept my fate.

I don’t want somewhere to run to
I don’t want somebody I can shake
Lord I want my dignity again
Before I walk on fire
You gotta look me in the face

I won’t flinch
And I won’t turn away

I admit I am afraid. I am scared. When one is counting days, how many is enough to say Yes?

You asked WHY?

Because I need to feel, I need someone to see me. Because I need to know that the worst pain I could ever feel is behind me, beyond me, and will never define me.

Fresh Air and Spring Flowers

March 2004