Surviving goodbye

Days are getting fewer and yet I am growing increasingly restless. I have gotten past the worst and am now breathing again. Despite that, I cannot be calmed.

What remains of my time here is going to be tough for I find myself unwilling to do anything anymore. I may be physically present but my mind wanders. I am seated somewhere well-lighted and spacious with the view of the sky almost black with pollution. I am hearing a lot of noise - talks about the recent political boo-boo, furious tip-tapping of the keyboard as the deadline nears, door opening followed by hurried footsteps.

I am no longer suffocated in the corner nodding wordlessly. Temporary compliance and patient tolerance just to get by until this is finally over is how I survive until I can feel, smile, be me once more.

There is no going back now. I have never felt so free.

The other versions of Whitney Houston's Greatest Love of All

Reminder to self: buy a huge mirror so I can hold a staring contest with myself.

  

Image taken from CJ de Silva's website

After Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Mortality

Each day, we die a little. How do we keep some of ourselves from dying?

The Business of Love is Cruelty

Dean Young

It scares me the genius we have

for hurting one another. I’m seven,

as tall as my mother kneeling and

she’s kneeling and somehow I know

exactly how to do it, calmly,

enunciating like a good actor projecting

to the last row, shocking the ones

who’ve come in late, cowering

out of their coats, sleet still sparkling

on their collars, the voice nearly licking

their ears above the swordplay and laments:

I hate you.

Now her hands are rising to her face.

Now the fear done flashing through me,

I wish I could undo it, take it back,

but it’s a question of perfection,

carrying it through, climbing the steps

to my room, chosen banishment, where

I’ll paint the hair of my model

Bride of Frankenstein purple and pink,

heap of rancor, vivacious hair

that will not die. She’s rejected

of course her intended, cathected

the desires of six or seven bodies

onto the wimp Doctor. And Herr Doktor,

what does he want among the burning villages

of his proven theories? Well, he wants

to be a student again, free, drunk,

making the cricket jump, but

his distraught monster’s on the rampage

again, lead-footed, weary, a corrosive

and incommunicable need sputtering

his chest, throwing oil like a fouled-up

motor: how many times do you have to die

before you’re really dead?