Lost Sensations

More than words
I miss the warmth of your touch
Coming from inside me
The sea motion when I closed my eyes
Lying beside you
The forest taste of your kiss
You have vanished into the trees
Sailed away
I cannot even imagine
You

Tonight I Will Count Dolphins

Tonight I will count dolphins
Hemming the edge of the ocean two by two
With a running stitch
Playful, friendly, unreachable
We dive clumsily into the brisk waves
Our stories unfolded on the beach
Making a grey speck in the fog filled distance
Later we shiver in the car together
You have to be warm enough to shiver
In the dark we find each other
Two strange mammals on the edge of the land
So much heat

Steep Ravine

Seagulls ride the ocean wind
That slaps the rain against our window
Their sillhouettes half an infinity
Enduring in my mind
As you say you are flying
And I long to sink forever
Under your warm body
Looking up at the cloud ridden sky
A perfect exchange of ecstasy for heat
Our ship tethered to the rock like this cabin
Knowing someday the wind will lift me up
Afloat on the waves of your tender care

Crazy world!

This is a truly crazy world that we live in! It makes me feel warm inside to think that I have a life in the dreams and fantasies of so many other people, some of them near and some of them far away. Most of them probably don't even know me, or not very well. Some I have met only once or twice, and yet they keep thinking of me, just as I sometimes think about them. I think that this really is a connection, of sorts. We can't help being constructed this way, even at the edge of our capacity, when the mind breaks down from dementia or was never intact in the first place, we have this idea of the other. I have had clients who were developmentally delayed to the degree of being unable to tease out one day from the next, to remember their own age, or consistently hold onto the distinction between reality and fantasy. But even in this liminal state, we all dream of being with another, and wish to share these dreams. Maybe it's all there is left.

At some level I wish there were someone I could be with physically as well as emotionally. But then, that is harder, negotiating an actual relationship in the between of two real people instead of this fuzzy overlap amongst all our dreams.

Timing

How come sometimes a pair of eyes

A mouth, a kiss, a moment

Of connection become a you,

A you-niverse in my mind

Replacing all others?

And when is it ever safe

To fall in love in a world

So full of other people?

A sad love story in three poems

Links in a Chain
May 2008
This you will not understand
How your face pressed itself
Into a loop, in my mind
Coming between me and my new lover
Not because of what you said
But what you did not say
Because of what you did not hear
Not what you heard
Because your eyes were always closed
You dance to the beat of your own drummer
Like a rat in a maze, always running
Around the same loop
In your own mind
'This you will not understand'
And I don't understand it either

The Gift of Doubt
June 2008
Sometimes the pale sun shimmers behind the morning fog
and I doubt it will ever burn through.
Maybe the order of days has been revoked?

I revisit the question: who am I?
As important as a fly
in the everlasting evolution of the universe.

And who are you? You turn my no into a yes
you turn my yes into a no and squash me
leaving the crazy footprints of my dance upon the sand

leaving me to doubt and know
I will build another castle in the sand
The sun will shine another day, and we'll both burn

in the endless cycle
dust unto dust unto dust

The Missing Peace

April 2009

The space inside my head is quiet

Now I have the missing piece

You gave me, that

you didn't have to give

You thought that the pieces

were interchangeable,

that women were.

No wonder your puzzle

didn't fit together!

You thought what flies with one

flies with another, flies

because it flies

Your world is very broken. You witheld

your whole self, and gave me

just one piece

and shattered mine

Look in the mirror

Look at yourself

You are neither

all good nor all bad.

When you are whole

you can give yourself

over and over

If you give piecemeal

part to me, part to her, part to her

you fall apart, dissembling

what you think you save.

Pick up the pieces!

I thank you for the missing peace,

the quiet space inside my head

Wide open, so much that it hurts

Is this how the sky feels

when the clouds are swept away?

Thoughts on male and female jealousy

After a conversation I had with someone the other evening, we came up with the following hypothesis. Jealousy is different in males and females, and seems to follow opposite (and hence equally irrational) order considerations. Men seem to be more jealous when their partner (either monogamous, polyamorous, or whatever) is seeing or in love with somebody that they consider inferior, a jerk, 'don't know what she sees in him.' On the other hand, women are more jealous when their partner (or former partner) is with a younger, more attractive, or accomplished woman, whereas they are less sensitive to him seeing a woman they consider inferior. For either sex, their view of the ordering seems the only rational one but clearly neither way is rational.

I wonder what you think of this hypothesis. Please feel free to add examples and counter-examples in your comments. In particular, I would be interested in finding out whether a man would feel more jealous if his former partner were with a jerk. It makes no sense to me that he would, but then the whole male perspective on jealousy makes no sense to me, and seems to hark back to primate ancestors giving in to the alpha male, never mind droit de seigneur. And how does it work for gays, lesbians, and others?

Blueberries

The words I am looking for
explode on the tongue like blueberries
in the middle of a kiss,
showering us both with laughter.
Juicy, just right, not too sweet.

I wish I could envelop you
with the warm haze I feel
my heart touching your heart
like friendly embers kindling
in the afterglow.

Why is it so easy to fall in love?

I did it twice this week. Once as a result of (okay, pretty wonderful) sex and being accepted, and the second time simply from talking with someone who seemed to like me, and looking him in the eyes. Now I'm not sure whether I'm in love with both or if one, which. Being with the two of them concurrently makes no sense. I'll probably just wait and see who calls back, if anybody.

I have a theory about what I call the construction of the soul. Some people's minds, mine included, contain an inner conversation which is more a dialog than a monologue whereas other people each talk alone as 'I' on the empty stage of their mind. I have some friends whose souls are constructed like mine. I imagine the person to whom my thoughts are addressed as a soulmate, and being 'in love' with someone, in my world, means being that person. I think that the people whose soul is constructed differently mean something else by being 'in love'. Unfortunately, both of the men I'm in love with seem to have the other soul construction.

Maybe someday I will fall in love with somebody whose soul is constructed like mine, and we will vanish in a puff of our own imaginations.

What if, swimming against the tide

What if I had my bike with me that day, and we had gone just a couple of miles further along 2nd St? We would have come to a little beach park, overlooking the bay. I would have swum, like I did there today, maybe you would have swum too. Things might have been different. You wanted someone to come home to, and we could have been that for one another, perhaps... Except that you didn't even acknowledge this was what you wanted, you only projected it onto me, saying it was what I wanted. And I'm not certain it is. It would have been nice, for sure. But I'm pretty happy coming home to my cat and my dog and my kids, listening to Bach really loud and cooking lentil soup like my grandmother used to make it. Yet I still think of you there now, waiting for me on the beach perhaps, not knowing you're waiting just there for some other reason, as I swim back to the shore against the tide, avoiding a trail of jellyfish. I know that reality doesn't work like that, that all the what ifs spangle out in other dimensions only to peter away and they don't generally loop back into this one. What if the jellyfish had stung me on the way out? They might still sting on the way back in. There are other less pleasant what ifs, spreading from our encounter, measured in millimeters rather than miles. Am I condemned to be haunted forever by all the what ifs?

And all the others. You who remembered that I wanted to swim in the bay at midnight and that's why I would like to be where you are now, near the ocean. If I were there with you we could have played hooky and biked to the beach together instead of waiting for the train that is running late. Why do I feel like I've missed the boat and you're on it?

Why does there always have to be a you? Maybe my present happiness is conditional on the one who is always there, just a phone call away. You will never read this, because you think it's silly, and you're probably right. Probably, you will never be here for me to come home to, but you know that I'm here for you. I hope you know that. Thank goodness we've stopped playing at maybe, forgoing the small pleasures of life for the sake of some future that might never happen to either of us, whether each for ourselves or one for the other.