So Many Poets...

So many poets spend so much time talking, rapping, writing about openness, love, the primal need to be as one with the world, with nature, and with other people.  They light up the room and their audience’s hearts with glowing phrases urging them to embrace life in all its diverse aspects.  To those who stop and listen they appear as lost messiahs for a species that has lost its way and wanders in dark places.

But so many poets are so vulnerable.  So when the slightest discomfort comes to them and when fear races through their mind and anxiety thunders through their bloodstream the lessons they impart to the world evaporate all too easily – blown away on a wind that is not blowing.  Fine words are replaced with walls and loving words with hatred as they crucify the transgressor who has dared to trespass in their eminent domain.

They do not know what it is like to live their dreams – so they hurt each other: Pain replacing pleasure and wisdom sinking into the sands of time like a weary shipwreck survivor.  And all I can ask is why? But that’s not the hardest part.

The hardest part is that I DO know.  You see when you responded to my affection with an “emphatic piss off” I was wounded and if I had been 18 at the time it would have taken all my willpower to stop me from falling to the floor crying – how could someone be so cruel? But 26 year olds better understand the tragedy of having the face every day with a marketable facade, face every stranger or ex-lover with deadly suspicion, and the need to pre-emptively hurt others to avoid being taken advantage of – in short, we know what society demands from us.

So I was wounded, a cut opened in the scar tissue around my heart and I bled but it was the words of a far better poet than me that saved me then: “I wish I could tell him that I love him”, “Gotta make love, and remake love...reincarnate love”, “That’s what love’s like...that’s what it was...what it is...what it will be...that’s what love’s like.” And the passion of those lines, the blood from my wounds and the defiance of my spirit poured forth into three words, your hostile message countered by that deepest yet simplest phrase: “I love you.”