All you need is love April 12, 2013

 

 

What is real and unreal?

Fear of losing something that is right there beside her. She is so used to trauma she clearly doesn’t trust a situation that comes off as too good

It defies her negative expectations.

These are some thoughts concerning her latest poem.

She opens the poem talking about a dream she had had for nearly all of her life, one that wakes her in the wee hours of the morning, winding her up so tight she can’t even cry about it, leaving her disjointed, and alone.

But as of late, she has company that seems to counter this fear, a breath of warmth that tampers down the dread.

Perhaps too good to be true. She is unexpectedly not alone.

The dreams, of course, still haunt her, warning her that she can never expect a traditional life and projecting the idea of a possibly short life as well.

The dream oozes into her awaking world.

Her fate is opposite of what she expected. She has never gotten what she wants or hopes for.

This new situation, this man in the bed beside her when she wakes from her nightmares, is cause for her to reevaluate her life, what she has and doesn’t have.

When it comes to materialistic things, she doesn’t have much. Yet she may well have what she needs, courage and strength to plunge ahead, as if she is lucky, having found love.

This poem like some of those prior to this, she clings to the idea of salvation, of a spark of hope against a history of hopelessness, and the presumption that she still yet might be saved by love.

As in many of her other poems, we get the narrator explaining the situation she is in, although also possibly a conscious plea to the man she is in love with as to why she needs their relationship to continue.

He has made her life better by simply being there when she most needs him.

This is most likely the same man she has been writing about for more than a month, the married man she desperately tried not to get involved with (keeping her lust a love affair of her mind), but got involve with anyway, and suffered a number of bumps in the road ever since.

Although lacking in any description, the poem is likely set in her bed where she has historically suffered nightmares and early morning waking, the hamster wheel brain thinking that has haunted her from childhood – and for nearly all of those years, she’s had to deal with this early morning trauma alone.

But not on this morning as the poem points out. He is there to comfort her, his gentle breathing reminding her she is no longer alone, although she doesn’t trust this can last.

Unlike her last few poems dealing with this relationship, this poem – while not completely free of negativity – it is more upbeat with a glimmer of hope as if she finally sees a possible way out of her crazy life, a life that has routinely denied her everything she always believed she deserved.

It is a poem that evaluates her life and concludes – while lacking material things that define success – she has those things that make life valuable: heart and integrity and power to push ahead, and more important the possibility of love.

The poem is constructed on five rough stanzas.

The first stanza talks about the repeated nightmare and how it jolts her awake. She does not describe the nightmare, only that it screwed her up too tight for tears, and all too aware of the emptiness of her life.

The second stanza changes this. While she still has the nightmares, there is a gentle breath beside her that helps dull the pain. She is no longer alone.

The third stanza gives clues to what these nightmares are about, a portion of which tells her she is not meant to live a normal life nor a long one.

The nightmare has seeped into the waking world. She continues to toss and turn. The fourth stanza says the new presence in her life forces her to take stock of her life, what she has and doesn’t have, and she concludes she might not be successful, but she has the stuff to push ahead, and may even – if the warm breath beside her indicates – have love in her life.

What she really needs is love.

It is very difficult from my perspective to know for certain that all of these recent poems are connected or even involve the same man. If they are connected, this poem is about hope for the future, and suggests that the man she is in love with has managed to remain at her side during those terrible overnights, although most likely he has to return to his wife, a good reason why she doesn’t trust this love to last.

The poem suggests a very tenuous relationship, powerful, yet also fragile, something that might blow away with a sudden gust of wind, and that she might wake up one morning from her nightmare and find him gone.

 

.  2012 menu 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more