Picking Up the Pieces...Again

I really don't know where to begin.  Things were supposed to be different.  And then, once again, I happened to myself.  Much faster than before, but the result is the same.  I'm left wondering if I'm a vile creature, and she's left regretting that I ever existed.

But I'm not making any excuses.

Right now, it feels like I am mentally incapable of reciprocating love.  But my heart seems unaware.  And my body keeps jumping left and right, an independent uncertain of which side to vote.  But the fact that it keeps happening tells me one startling truth that I've probably been aware of, but have been unwilling to embrace.  I am the problem.  So many different women can't all be wrong.  Especially when the methods and madness keep feeling the same.

I've stared at myself in the mirror for the last 10 minutes.  I'm trying to see who blinks first:  the charismatic poet still looking for true love or that heartless bastard that keeps fucking up the potential.  My latest scary thought is that I really can't tell them apart.  Because if they are one and the same, then this is going to be a long, lonely ride.  It's a good thing I've always embraced talking to myself.  Misery loves company, but it's hard to find when you're constantly all alone.

Even now, feeling like an emotional scab that's been picked at and momentarily left to heal, I have to laugh at myself.  I'm the hypochondriac complaining about medicinal side effects.  The suicide bomber who is irritable because the backpack is too heavy.  Meaning that I cause my own pain.  I imagine some saying shut up and suffer like you wanted.  But I am, like all of my relationships, conflicted.  I want love.  But I worry too much about what it should feel like, how long it should last, and whether it is deserved.  I start questioning.  Dissecting bits and pieces, until before long I've cut dozens of holes into the fabric, simply because I thought a strand or two looked shabby.  This is my nature, and I hate it.  But like anyone feeling stuck being "some kind of way", I really don't know where to begin to change.

Bring on the sleepless nights.  Cold sheets and the weight of an empty bed.  The worst part:  I can remember each one of them next to me.  And I'm not saying that to be callous.  It is a sad reality that I can't escape.  I've run into a few of them from time to time, women from my past who now stare blankly, as if they don't remember, or stab me with icy eyes, unable to forget.

Reading this, I make it seem like I'm Colin Farrell.  (I mean I've had some strange relationships, but I haven't propositioned any 70 year old ladies, thank you very much)  In actuality, it's not really that bad.  I'm just a bit mishap prone when it comes to love.  I'm hoping one day soon, I'll correct this.  Until then, my heart is as fragile as glass and now comes with a disclaimer:  Objects that appear in glass are much further away than they seem.

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet

This is How I Imagine it Feels

Losing Track        

by Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying.

Rare Groove, Feb. 10, 2011

Cage the Elephant --- Shake Me Down

Starts slow, but then delivers quite the punch. But what else can you expect from such a consistently awesome group?

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet

To Wake with Such a Feeling

Stephanie A.M.

she is everything that’s right about the morning,

bright,

stirring, realization that

I am so alive,

shining, reflecting pools,

her eyes find mine, eager,

spreading smiles through the air like

sunlight tendrils,

when they reach me

everything seems to begin

she is everything that’s right about the morning,

gentle,

soft new beginnings, joy

trickles down her thighs,

singing songs

in the key of me

that always wake me from my slumber,

I dream, to count the seconds until

I find her at my side,

for she is sunrise to my senses,

leaves them illuminated, prepared,

intrigued,  I touch her beauty,

taste the joy our hearts have shared,

so aware no darkness

stands a chance, as long as she is there

she is everything that’s right about the morning,

peaceful,

serene, splash of magnetic radiance,

that I grab and hold inside,

I gaze upon her like first flecks of new day,

startled by the beauty and yet so happy that

she’s finally arrived, she reflects

all of love’s brilliance, beaming

like daybreak before my eyes

she is everything that’s right about the morning,

and I long to keep her with me

through each and every night

[End Poem]

Feels pretty good.

Marcus Jamison, the Rare Poet

Some Just Have Gifted Pens

Urban Renewal XVII
What of my fourth-grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,
who weary after failed attempts to set to memory
names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around
the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:
Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class
after French painters whether boy or girl. Behold
the beginning of sentient formless life. And so,
my best friend Darnell became Marcel, and Tee-tee
was Braque, and Stacy James was Fragonard,
and I, Eduard Charlemont. The time has come to look
at these signs from other points of view. Days passed
in inactivity before I corrected her, for Eduard was
Austrian and painted the black chief in a palace in 1878
to the question whether intelligence exists. All of Europe
swooned to Venus of Willendorf. Outside her tongue,
yet of it, in textbooks Herodotus tells us of the legend
of Sewosret, Egyptian, colonizer of Greece,
founder of Athens. What’s in a name? Sagas rise and
fall in the orbs of jump ropes, Hannibal grasps a Roman
monkey bar on history’s rung, and the mighty heroes at recess
lay dead in woe on the imagined battlefields of Halo.
                     ----   Major Jackson