12.07.2011
the boy who blocked his own shot posted at 12/07/2011 03:41:00 PM
So call it quits, or get a grip.
Say you wanted a solution, you just wanted to be missed.
Everything turbulent and fearsome makes more sense when placed in the compartments of a rational mind, and so the enumeration.
1. Yesterday I discovered more of his ghosts--ones he never told me about, forgotten, or perhaps wished to forget. For a moment there was a sense of entitlement and then it bothered me that I had a sense of entitlement to his feelings, no less. As much as we want to own people, as much as a beloved announces their betrothal to us, as much as they say "I am yours," I remember that I must take this with a pinch of salt. It's a wonder what googling can do and the names that pop up, what asking a few people here and there can unearth from the past. Of course I won't mention a single word of this to him--it's his past, I dug around, and I'm covering my tracks.
I'm aware he's made the same promises before, so what remains to be seen is if he will go through with this.
I'm just going to think that I know nothing. I know though, I've always learned how to read between the lines.
2. When I remember the people I learned from, I realized we all had one point where we came from--we understood leaving, farewells, goodbyes, that last poignant note.
Ricci and I felt that with each other, and with Ophelia Dimalanta's legacy, we all learned that from her. It pains me to realize that my poetry holds such a huge sway on the way I will handle those I love, and that I rebel against myself because I do want to keep what I have now together, until that terrible word: forever.
In Ramil Digal Gulle's tribute poem regarding the death of Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, "Ophelia's Water-Method to Ecstacy," he points this concept of leaving out of love so very well:
Now I can tell you’re done: small feet padding
across the bathroom carpet, hand against baby-
blue tile, wet black coils set to spring from
under the towel, an alert nakedness beneath
the bathrobe. But this time, I have the mind to leave
because leaving’s the only way for me to stay.
To depart, as you might wish, with a love for love’s
contradictions: something to have but never keep.
You mastered this last, most lasting trick: leave
everything to the beloved—dreams, books, apartment,
coffee, clothes—everything, except ourselves.
And now it scares me to understand what I have always been capable of. Even when being left behind I have managed to leave a mark on the people who have hurt me--despite me not being there. Modesty aside, I attribute this quality to the poetry I write and the poetry I was raised with.
It's very frightening.
3. This is very important. I have found the ability to leave, and cannot will it away once more. If I do, I will definitely be unable to stand on my own, and as it is I do not think I can lean on anyone completely, at all.
There seems to be no one who can give me that privilege.
You are calm and reposed, let your beauty unfold,
pale white like the skin stretched over your bones.
Spring keeps you ever close.
You are second hand smoke,
you are so fragile and thin, standing trial for your sins;
holding onto yourself the best you can--
You are the smell before the rain,
You are the blood in my veins.
Brand New's The boy who lost his shot.
Labels: poetry, pointless, sad
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