Poetry 365

In little dark-ringed frames of light
the neighborhood is dining: heads nod
to one another; candlelight catches on things—
threads of it snapped by knives and forks,
the glass of water, the wine. No one

is not at home here except the man
walking the block alone and peering in
as if he were a visitor from beyond
and wanted to feast his eyes again
on this picture of felicity, trying to read

the lips winestained and quick in talk,
faces where light plays like a dog
in water—haloes of hair, hands flying.

If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.

We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.

There’s also the gym. If you’re shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could put headphones in (guitar stroke).

And there’s public transportation, because we all gotta go places.

And there’s prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you’re hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.

Start simple. Things you may have previously (electric guitar plucking) based on your avoid being alone principals.

The lunch counter. Where you will be surrounded by chow-downers. Employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they — like you — will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner. A restaurant with linen and silverware. You’re no less intriguing a person when you’re eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.

Go to the movies. Where it is dark and soothing. Alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community.

And then, take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching…because, they’re probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back like a brook of blessings.

Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.

Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there’re always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might’ve never happened had you not been there by yourself

Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.

You could stand, swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther for the endless quest for company. But no one’s in your head and by the time you translate your thoughts, some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept.

Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school’s groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay. Cuz if you’re happy in your head than solitude is blessed and alone is okay.

It’s okay if no one believes like you. All experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you, for this be releived, keeps things interesting lifes magic things in reach.

And it doesn’t mean you’re not connected, that communitie’s not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it. take silence and respect it. if you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it. if your family doesn’t get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it.

you could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it
If your heart is bleeding make the best of it
There is heat in freezing, be a testament.

Late at night, when you’re so lonely
your shoulders lean to the center of your body,
you call no one and you don’t call out.

This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness
that made Christ think he was God.
This is why lunatics smile at their thoughts.

Even the best moment, as you slip
half-a-foot deep into someone you like,
deepens to the loneliness in it

and loneliness that’s not. If you believe in
Christ hanging on the cross, his arms spread
as if to embrace the Father he calls

who is somewhere else, you still might hear
your own voice at your next great embrace
thinking Loneliness in another can’t be touched,

like Christ’s voice at death answering himself.

We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one

as the fire snaps in the stove
and out eyes close,

and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,

we drowse as horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold

surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

And the world changed.
There had been trees and people,
Sidewalks and roads

There were fish in the sea.

Where did all the rocks come from?
And the smell of explosives
Iron standing in mud
We crawled everywhere on the ground without seeing the earth again

We were ashamed of our half life and our misery: we saw that everything had died.

And the letters came. People who addressed us thru our lives
They left us gasping. And in tears
In the same mud in the terrible ground

she drew in the sand half a heart and spilled wine over the leaves
of summer. driving her car into the seven/eleven she dreamed
of whispering in the ear of a baseball player asking him to
stumble upon her tattoo, a thing not easy in itself to do without
invitation, with half a heart. the dream blue on green,
making yellow in defiance of afternoon sunlight among the thorns
and broken shards of glass without invitation, with half a
heart. she brought him color, and luck of proper wing and sun.
he imagined she loved him despite his illnesses, remembered visits
from her at the asylum on sundays bringing packages of coconut
without invitation, with half a heart. he spends his days asking
only that i never mention her aloud. so i take my box of crayons
and mark over the empty places trying so hard to match the
colors, knowing i will never fool anyone without invitation, with
half a heart.

seen from a great enough distance i cannot be seen
i feel this as an extremely distinct sensation
of feeling like shit; the effect of small children
is that they use declarative sentences and then look at your face
with an expression that says, ‘you will never do enough
for the people you love’; i can feel the universe expanding
and it feels like no one is trying hard enough
the effect of this is an extremely shitty sensation
of being the only person alive; i have been alone for a very long time
it will take an extreme person to make me feel less alone
the effect of being alone for a very long time
is that i have been thinking very hard and learning about existence, mortality
loneliness, people, society, and love; i am afraid
that i am not learning fast enough; i can feel the universe expanding
and it feels like no one has ever tried hard enough; when i cried in your room
it was the effect of an extremely distinct sensation that ‘i am the only person
alive,’ ‘i have not learned enough,’ and ‘i can feel the universe
expanding and making things further apart
and it feels like a declarative sentence
whose message is that we must try harder’

We looked up at an angle, towards the interior of an anonymous room.
Through a window: lilies in a vase, a wedding gown,
committing
the slowest of waltzes on the dressmaker’s dummy.
We bailed out the rowboat, trapped in the middle of a sinkhole
of longing: ripple of silver, the trout
beneath the water.
We were caught by the teacher, and as
punishment
wrote on the blackboard:
I shall not love him I shall not
love him—one hundred
times—
the chalk made us cough.

Feasting and drinking went on far into the night
but in the end we went home alone to console ourselves
which seems to be what so many things are all about
like the branches of a tree just after the wind
     stops blowing.