In Response to A Question

So, for those of you who read this blog, I have submitted my fan fiction to a good friend of mine who is running a nerd's website of sorts. He will be debuting it soon, I believe, and I will be published under a pen name, largely due to the fact that I'm not really ready to attach my name to something this big. It may also be that I'm outwardly very much a prude, and this fan fiction is definitely blush worthy. Needless to say, The Nerd Filter will be launched very soon, so you all should definitely subscribe to it. It is run by a couple of my coworkers, and I have no doubt that it will be a huge success. It is also a relief to finally be rid of that God-awful piece of writing.

On to my topic for the week: love. It's a topic that has come up before. I've mentioned it in terms of lust and the differences between the two, and I said that I wasn't really sure what the differences between the two were. Not to say they aren't mutually exclusive: you can love someone and definitely lust after them, though the two feelings are definitely very different, and I did know that, but I didn't understand how. But I think I'm beginning to.

The feelings I felt for the subject of those poems were primal, basic, and without much depth. Lust is primal. Lust is looking at someone and saying, take me, if only for tonight, and not caring what happens afterward. Or you might care, but it isn't about what happens to the person you are feeling for. Lust is a dream and a figment of your imagination, what you wish could be love, but in your heart of hearts, you know can't be. It is selfish and it is a dark curiosity that can easily be satisfied.

Love is innumerably deeper. Love is bigger than physical attraction. Love is admitting to yourself that pride doesn't matter. Love is that connection, that understanding that you share with someone to imply your desire to do whatever it takes to make the other person's life better. Sometimes it comes in the form of reverence. Sometimes it comes in the form of embrace (and I do mean embracing personality quirks). Sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice. You literally lose all desire to gain anything that would detriment the other person in any way. There are even cases, more numerous than should be physically possible, where we lay our hearts on the line for the people we love, where we take our hearts and smash them up before we can even try to receive love. We look at ourselves and deem ourselves too unworthy for the person we love to even dare consider giving ourselves a chance because we'd rather not disappoint the objects of our affections. We would rather stay away than risk injury. It is, of course, a noble effort, whatever the cost. I myself have been found guilty of dismissing my value for the value of keeping someone safe, and I have found people guilty of doing it for me. Some of those people were right in doing so. Not all of them were.

It is in those few cases that I would advocate for strength and courage. I have been the victim of being kept safe from the love of another, and more than anything, I was offended that I was not given the opportunity to make that decision myself. I would have asked for a chance, and damned the consequences, for I missed out on something that I might have wanted, had I known it was an option. True love only comes to us in every few lifetimes, and it is not something to be dismissed for what would seem to be the greater good. Pain, while not pleasant, is a reminder that we are alive and that we are strong. I would rather live in pain and see life for what it could be than merely survive without feeling at all. I want to be loved, and not for my beauty or my grace, but for my intellect and my good humor and, damn it all if not for my clumsy feet as well. I have had enough of lust. Whatever the sacrifice, I want to feel love again, and make someone feel loved even more than that. We all should get that chance at least once, to have that satisfaction of making someone feel whole.

I know this post is a little preachy. I know there's no poem this time. But I guess I figured there are enough love poems in the world, and I'm sure I'll write more of my own on my own time anyways. I just want it to be clear that I do get it. I know what it is to lust, and I most assuredly know what it is to love. Perhaps I will even find love someday. I'll be looking for it, wherever it is.

This post is dedicated to an old friend, who also needs to learn the difference between lust and love.

Heart of Darkness (It Isn't Just a Book)

I've always, ever since I started being discerning about who I let in my life, said that I'm good at being alone. Now, I say this, and I want you to know that this doesn't mean I like it. One of my very good friends heard me say this once, and he promptly told me that no one is good at being alone. No one likes being alone. No one wants to go through life unnoticed, unrecognized, and unloved, and that is what you become when you are alone. No one is there to tell you if you are a good person or a bad person. No one is there to tell you their opinion on the deeds you've done and the words you've spoken. No one is there for you when you are alone, and it possibly the most unhealthful feeling in the world to feel alone.

And that is what he thought I meant when I said I'm good at being alone. Had that been my meaning, he would have been right. But I don't like being alone. I'm simply practiced at it. I know how to survive long periods of time without contact with the outside world. When the task asks me to act the shut-in hermit, I do it without question and with uncanny finesse. It is like the saying goes: once bitten, twice shy.

There is safety in loneliness, despite how detrimental it can be to one's psyche. No one can take advantage of you, no one can break your heart, and no one can betray you. For a long time, I was convinced that it was all anyone ever wanted to do to me: all they wanted to do was use me for their own ill-gotten gains. I will admit that I am gullible. I still retain some innocence, and despite my protestation, I will even go so far to admit that I can be something of an idealist. And it isn't a bad thing. But in a world where people are so easily corrupted, it isn't the smartest thing either. So I broke off from my friends and from those I deemed too fallible to keep safely in my heart. After that, there was a long time when I had no friends, only myself and my writing to keep me company. Obviously, I went a little mad.

I've never addressed this dark point in my life. In that time, I didn't write poems. I wrote fan fiction and played video games and made a fantasy world for myself: an escape from my solitude. It was only last spring that I was able to reemerge from my seclusion. Now, almost eight months later, I will attempt to speak on that black time. I will try to convey the anger and the fear that I still strive daily to overcome.

Walking Through the Fires Unhanded

If ever I had tried to love, it was with an open heart and open mind,
and I thought the best of all I touched, believing so strongly
that the light I carried would shine bright enough to touch them,
to kindle little lights of their own.

But woeful was the girl who did not understand that darkness
is sometimes our closest companion. Our shadows are thick,
full of our hatreds and hurts, and we are daunted
by the prospect of letting in what small sunlight there is for us,
since with the sun comes the painful truth of seeing what monsters we harbor.

Since I was ignorant of whatever monstrosity festered and grew in my soul
as I was continually refused, the day it grew to match my height
was a shock, a stalker hiding behind the curtains leaping out with a knife.
However, death was not the foe that claimed me.

Black anger, tart and putrid, filled me, and all of a sudden,
I was the darkness. I walked through shadows as if I was one,
and they knew me too as one of their own, welcoming me to their
pitted ranks, their humble existence.
And no longer was I counted among human company.

So still, I waited for the light to capture me, and it was an unending game
as I eluded the candle that flickered once in my heart of hearts.
Until one day, my shadow-friends took fright from a glance my way.
I chased them, pursued them with anguished cries, but could not coax them.

It was that day I realized:
the candle had been there all along.

Waiting for the Full Moon

Today is the day of the new moon, and it is overcast where I am. I am sorely missing the nights when I could walk outside, and not worry about being lost in the darkness for the light of the full moon above me.

Why are we so fascinated with the Moon? Back in the day before we could travel in outer space and use technology to uncover the secrets of the world around us, it was understandable: the Moon was a mysterious orb in the sky, and no one really understood its purpose other than it was what we could expect it to reflect the Sun's rays back to Earth and illuminate our night skies. It inspired a ridiculous amount of mythology for the ancients and today, it is still apart of our urban legends, despite the fact that we pretty much have all the facts and knowledge of it that we can really gather.

Obviously, as a writer and a lover of lore, I am obliged to write about the Moon.

Diana and the Hunt

Through the night, she passes, her glowing face mirrored in
starlight and celestial incandescence: she is the fierce, the wild,
the unnameable force that makes the water dance at her feet.
She is the dauntless nature that summons the tide.

Her cries are those when her face is fully shining and the wolves are her voice,
calling to their Sister to lead them into the night,
where prey and playmates come out to join them in their dance.
They are the lovers of joy and family, and she is their matriarch,
shooting fiery arrows through the night sky when the weather is warm,
to celebrate their fraternal bonds.

Dark comes a time, on every other fortnight, when she hides herself,
her shame at having let herself go too much,
indulged too abruptly in the splendors of the Earth below her.
But it is when the sullen lowing of her children breaks her heart,
a warding away of her solitude,
that she is coaxed back to us, back from the velvet void above us.

She dances above our heads, watching over us as an elder sister would,
guiding us through the shadows.
Diana waits and watches, arrow nocked and ready
to slay the beast that hunts her little friends.

Speaking of Thoreau...

I definitely took a day out, deciding to channel Henry David Thoreau: only my version of Walden is not a pond in the middle of a deciduous forest. My Walden is a little park that I helped raise funding for about seven years ago, full of Douglas Firs and cedars and all other manner of mosses and ferns and vines that belong to the Pacific Northwest. While taking my walk along the very unkempt trails (they used to be very tidy until I stopped volunteering for school's sake), I did what I always do: I think.

The next morning, I sat down and wrote for a while, and being that I was up earlier than usual, I noticed that we'd started getting frost in the mornings, much to my delight. Of course, I wrote about that too. I know it is only two days after my last post, but these two poems were too good and too irresistible not to post, and I'm feeling a little proud of myself for getting two poems out in the same time period.

The First Frost of a Northwestern Winter

The first frost comes with surprise -
like an ice cube slipped down the back of your shirt,
see how the world gasps under its touch.
Like a neophyte's first kiss, new and epiphanic,
the magic of the auroral freeze is only seen
in the few brief small hours of dawn.
It is the glow of a sleeping lover with hands peacefully
tucked beneath a yielding cheek, innocent out of context,
but surely reminds us of something more consuming and dark.

And then the Sun rises over the foothills, and
the spell is broken.
The frozen ground shudders, warmth pulsing through,
and her eyes flutter open, slowly as the dream fades.
The world comes to life, stretching, awakening, and any memory
of the cold stillness is gone into the night.
Life has resumed, and the frost melts without apology.

Still, it is no secret, that for some time to come
the frost will return, insatiably and vehemently obstinate.
And, like the sweetheart we keep soundly in our arms as we wait
for sunrise to break the enchantment on our hearts,
we shall wake and expect it with almost dependence.
We shall hope for the ushering comfort of winter.


Transcendentalism's Call

Passing over root and moss-ridden stone,
my boots would carry me beyond the walls of society.
Though my pockets are heavy with tinkling car keys,
a phone that has kept strangely quiet for a good amount of time,
and my Zune that I've whimsically put to the sappy task
of playing love songs: softer ballads for a softer realm.
Techno-Gaga-dance music holds no court here in my kingdom.

With every step I take, I find something new.
The feather of a Stellar's jay, silver-blue-gray in the green bracken,
The rustling of a foraging squirrel as he prepares for the Deep Slumber,
and the markings of cerulean paint on a tree, deemed unfit to live,
simply because it is in the way.
I regard the red splotch on my palm,
the one that my mother has me convinced marks me as a healer,
and I look up at the limbs above me, high enough to be three of me.
I've been tending, ministering to the creature of the earth,
for longer than I have time to tell.
So I breathe a hope, touch a blessing on the marred trunk,
with bark crispy and gray, ridden with lesions and lichen.

I hear an eagle's brusque call overhead as she circles.
She's hunting, and I consider my own predatory instinct.
I all too often leap before I look, a wild cat in the brush,
and almost as frequently, the bewildered look of frustration
crosses my face like wildfire as my prey slips through my snare.
This is my punishment I receive for not sharpening my claws
and for my impatience with stalking underfoot.

The sun is still high in the afternoon, and the wind
is brisk, invigorating my nerves like a caress, voiding the need for caffeine.
My walk becomes an impulsive sprint - I wish to feel alive,
the air whipping my face, the earth falling behind me.
I feel free, unbounded, and all too quickly,
the close wood becomes an open meadow.
I halt, unfamiliar with this change.
Like the beast I'm channeling, I creep back in,
aware that in the clearing I am exposed,
vulnerable to whatever is lurking in the shadows of the trees.

Finally, my trek ends, and I return to a shiny white Outback,
a vehicle that has served me well as my bearer to this freedom.
And now, I begrudge it the odious task
of bearing me back to civilization.

Jane and I

Seriously, you need to read Jane Hirshfield. She is one of my all-time favorite poets ever (following Sara Teasdale, Robert Frost, and followed by Langston Hughes and Henry Thoreau, all of whom you should read). Before I get to my own poem, I'll give you one of my favorite Hirshfield poems.


For What Binds Us
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.


I just find her style so provocative and real and down-to-earth. Poems should speak of the gravity of every day things that go unnoticed, should tell us a story that is both ours and not ours. She evokes images of horses with scars and bumps that, in real life, would make us believe that they are ugly or unimpressive, as well as with the dirty mug and the rusty nail, but she paints a deeper picture, one with feeling. The mark of a true poet is that you can feel exactly how the writer is feeling as you read their work without ever seeing a description of their emotions.

So here's one of mine, in respect to the little things in life.

The Bull and the Virgin

Under bare feet, callused and brown, the grass cringes from the weight of a human body,
springing back piece by piece, slowly reverting back to what it once looked like.
But it is not the same.

In white cotton, with a hem ripped from jumping fences, she floats,
a little cloud too small to rain, too pure to spark lightening.
Her eyes are that of the sea: they are old and knowing, and one can see
she has seen much in her young life.
Almost too much, as the storm lingers beyond the horizon of her irises.
And the split hairs that rain down from her crown are also sign that she,
as well as any wild thing, has more to care for
than the petty details of image.

The bull is mad, angered and fierce.
He is a proud beast, snorting and huffing in steam and stink.
A festering obstinacy keeps him steady, his feet firm stalks in the ground,
hooves that are rough from long treads through the craggy hills that led him here.
He stays true to a course he plotted out long ago,
and his cage is his realm, never his limitation.
Only the beauty can enter his domain without becoming a victim
of sharp, silent, undeniable suspicion.

Her hand, bleeding and burnt, heals slowly,
but there is much to be gained from the company of animals and of the earth,
too much to stay away for good.
Her eyes are decided
as they descend on those of her companion.
His eyes are soft and doting as they turn on his mistress, much less
the furied balls of dark flame that would mark a man walking dead.
They remain in their Eden for a spell before they must return
to the harsh reality of life.