OTHER WORLDS AND WORDS:
Check this page regularly for new words and worlds!
On this page, poems (by me and others), essays, quotes, and other interesting or important ideas and issues will rotate regularly.
New post: April 11, 2015
Check this page regularly for new words and worlds!
On this page, poems (by me and others), essays, quotes, and other interesting or important ideas and issues will rotate regularly.
New post: April 11, 2015
DEAD WALKING
He doesn’t understand. She is unhappy
with no need, he thinks, to be.
“I don’t know you,” she cries.
“Twenty years,” he says (baffled).
“How can it be? Twenty years I work, take out the garbage,
don’t fuck anybody else, don’t get drunk, never
hit you. So what’s not to know?” Is his weary answer.
And she stares (baffled) and whispers:
“I don’t know you.”
He doesn’t understand, looking
for a fact of his life she doesn’t know
that knowing will make her happy.
He doesn’t understand she needs his heart;
He doesn’t understand he needs it too.
He doesn’t understand she’s pointing out the door
to his missing life, the life he doesn’t know
he needs.
He doesn’t understand: her heart cares not for facts
or garbage out on time; he thinks a pill
might help her to not cry so much
for facts he cannot find.
He doesn’t understand that he’s dead walking;
that his own heart is his last hope; that
she wants no thing or fact but food
for her starving woman’s soul; that
touching her heart back would bring her smile -
the one that touched his own back then.
He’s not a bad man or she’d be gone.
He’s only thick, remembering not her smile
but her breasts; perhaps back then
he mistook his heart’s touch for a side effect
of his hard on instead of the reverse.
How ironic: had he thought less
just felt the touch, he’d now feel the hunger
of his own soul for the nourishment her touch
could bring.
But he didn’t, then and doesn’t, now.
Instead he’s baffled for what to do,
as if doing, any doing, could heal his heart
that needs to be touched.
Dead man walking
doesn’t know he’s wounded, won’t know
he was dying now, until she’s gone.
And she will go eventually. She
has it in her to do so.
Unless -
She, for her part, doesn’t get it either, believing
in her woman’s heart that one-way touch can heal.
In that case she’ll go on crying out to know him,
dead walking herself, because she can’t know the truth:
There’s no more life in giving without stopping
than in receiving without feeling.
In that case they make a pair,
dead couple
walking.
VPW
VPW