being

Who cares? I keep asking. But the page doesn't answer. Who will you stimulate? Not me, for one. And not most people. But the few who live off this madness. They're mad! All of them. And they ask me to reproduce it. Why do they live off it? Can't they feel anything simple anymore? Does it all have to be so convoluted, complex, compressed into tiny spaces unseen by mere mortals, but "fun" for those academics so washed with the language of fine matter that nothing gentle interests them anymore? Yes. Because they own me, and they've lost the power to be caressed by mortals. They are the masters of argument, and I can't argue to their liking. The servant who can't prepare the tea just right is unreliable, yet unreleased. He is hired to fail. Oh, I'll get my justice when I'm the master. I'll devour my heirs, their embarrassments will repay me. I'll shoot down all the idiot notions of clowns like me . . . as soon as I'm not a clown. At least, that's the thought I should be having because that's the thought that will drive me to madness--the happy state of masters. But I can't think. I can't understand the words on this page. It does not feel like life to me. It leaves no space for being.

My Last Crush

She makes the sunrise
And I was there to see it.
I held her face in my hands
until it burned my fingertips.

She makes the sunshine
And I was there to see it.
I played during the light hours
and ran to her with every smile.

She makes the sunset
And I was there to see it.
I was the purple hue fading
between her and the growing cold.

She makes the starlight
And I could barely see it.
I held her face in my eyes
until frozen tears shattered it.

She makes the sunrise
And I was not there.
I was making the rain fall
And she was standing in it.

My First Crush

If I could turn you into sunlight's ray,
you'd yet be with me when so far away.
The dew on every flower'd reflect your face,
but alas, without such realness and such grace
as has the moment rare and soft with you.
Me thinks I shall not want for sun, but you.
--May 2003

I wrote this for someone a long time ago. My first crush after the mission. See how simple it was to love back then? How new and harmless? My words are as innocent and free as they are naive. There is something childish about them, so lost in what I'd found, so simple in what I needed. And now when love is the prison I can't seem to escape, I wish for the first crush again, when love was a candy store, and I knew nothing of cavities.