For Alanna: Sadness

  This is not a poem. It is placed on the page to look like a poem but it is prose put in poem form, page-wise only: what the old boyos in the “beat” days called shit like this, prosey.

For Alanna: Sadness

Who thought love was walking around in bliss all of the time?
No one said that did they?
No one whose feelings weren’t opaque said that.
Love is hard sometimes.
It takes the wind right out of you, doesn’t it?
Okay… one spirit meets another…
a chemistry happens…
something in the brain says something to the heart
or the other way around.
What does it matter?

Who says we don’t love the pain of love?
Why do I go back to it when flight
or fight dictates otherwise?
Fools rush in, they say, and then
Fools rush in again and again.
Again and again… swoosh!
There again and again I’m there.

You hold a child in your arms a few years
and she is in your arms forever a child.
There is no explaining or denying it
by explaining or denying it.

I surrender to it all… the universe of suffering…
the passion of love denied.
What else is there?
To go to the grave across the River
with a boat-load of regrets about it…
I could have loved better
or I could have loved less?

Passion denied is grief.
Grief denied is inane.
Why not give up to the
emotion and float with dreams?
Isn’t that better than being nothing at all?