When I have fears that I might cease to be before this pen has gleaned my teeming brain....

You must admire the skill of an actor (Nicholas Cage, Adaptation) as he turns to a twin who will be the later digital insertion of himself and utters the most poignant, moving lines... These words said with a gentle smile, breaking open something in me like an egg rapped on a counter.

You are what you love, not what loves you.

I have thought about that line every day for weeks . . . because I want it, and I want it to be true in my life. That is, being at a point where the love I have for something cannot even be lessened by the rejection or spite or expiration of even the object itself, let alone the arbitrary opinions of those around me. I want that with urgency, and wholeness, and a collapsing pressure.
That same actor is unfazed when he is told the girl he loved only ridiculed him in return. "I loved her," he explains serenely, exquisitely, "and she had no right to take that away from me." It is a new concept, happiness not being contingent on reciprocation or a requition, only this intricate resolve. Love is not lace, he's telling me, love is steel.

Lately my heart has been one long series of bated contractions, with all those desires streaked through a fit of dread just barely tranquilized in the pit of my stomach and I am afraid, so afraid, of its awakening. I still have one person left in my life to forgive, and I am digging and unfolding to find the will to do it. However, the fortunate production of an unwound, vaguely frantic/idle mind is this thing we call poetry, even though I cannot figure out how to format it...


In a blink
(smooth sharp sun youth)

you are here,
you are you.

Veins, some intangible function
Tissue and torment
Tumbling

Laced with a rude and glinting tinsel (time)
You are here
What does it mean,
To breathe? Piling
things and thoughts
In a vault in a brain in a soul
Linking magnetic cotton
You
Know the tingle of after-idle limbs
Crescents on your fingernails

A little smoke in your lungs
A little warmth down your throat

Oh! Hoping you’ve loved.