• Articles and Presentations
• Poetry
• Links
• Home
• Contact

A Love Poem

You say I don’t love you

I love you no different than my parents

loved me.

Isn’t that love?

Neither of us knows.

Love has no formula

to be held to the light.

I have what I felt

when my parents cared for me,

as they could.

Is that love?

Or are they impaired,

am I impaired,

so that what I grasped

was too full of gaps

to be substantial.

You say I don’t hug you.

I will hold you.

You say I don’t care enough or care too much.

I will care more or less.

You say I shout

From now on I will whisper.

The problem isn’t proving to you that I am able to love

but believing it myself.

 Note: We learn to love from our parents, and I believe I should love better but feel unable.

Beneath

Beneath the silence I found pain

and  beneath the pain…

I had never journeyed there,

thinking it never ending,

But as I grew older I learned that there

is no pain that cannot be overcome

and there can be an end to sadness.

So I immerged beyond the pain

to search for love beneath,

And found but silence once again.

Not the mute silence of denial,

a jealous silence, instead.

Silence like an empty vessel

waiting to be overfilled,

waiting to cascade.

A weary silence,

enervated by years of sadness

despairing of change.

A lonely silence

searching for a tether in the storm

in a world disjointed.

I had plunged ahead beyond the pain

hoping to find love,

and found but the wanting.

Note: Underneath my loneliness is my fantasy of overweening love.

Bewilderment

I am summoned by the solitude,

bewildered in the need to remember

and forget,

to talk yet am startled into silence

by my words.

To flee then stumble back

or is to draw near only to flee.

I never am sure how it begins,

only that it ends, not together

not apart,

anchored in a past that seems not to have existed.

Note: The 2g life is filled with paradoxes, the foremost being the silence that speaks so loudly  and a stifling closeness that isn’t close at all.

First Love

I loved her at a time

when I felt unloved,

unlovable.

When everyone but her offered advice but little support,

and change in a world of flux,

when I wished calm.

But my hunger was dagger-sharp and deep.

And its wounds were found in her reticence,

in her down-turned eyes.

So I distanced myself while there was still love to cherish,

a pinpoint on the horizon, like a twinkling star.

But I seek her yet,

in lobbies and airport terminals,

the renewed embraces with laden arms.

and the promise of return.

I mourn the passion that has vanished,

of love that has flown, never to recur.

Note: I can have a neediness and intensity that will drive others away
and drives my relationships toward disappointment.

New Love

Home was fierceness and clamor

so I sought a spouse of reserve and calculation

to assuage my pain,

a balm after the roiling magma of my childhood.

Temperate , with time, turned remote.

a relationship rimmed with frost

that I knew not to thaw,

so it slipped away.

Alone

I searched for intimacy to turn the corner,

but when it came by I shivered at the closeness

that, like gossamer,  passed through my substance,

but  would not cohere.

I yearned for reticence past

to feel its enervated coolness within my embrace.

I sought love anew

and found but love's decay.

Note: Based on a meeting with another 2g and her second marriage problems.
Be careful what you wish for… my fantasies are best left unfulfilled.

I do not wander, I follow

My sisters and I used to try and race,

but after a few yards one or another of us

would cry “no fair” throwing  up her  hands.

a new starting line would then be drawn,

And a new lamppost chosen in the distance.

We rarely finished a race.

I didn’t know then that these fits and starts would be

a metaphor for my life,

Of innumerable beginnings, each a little bit on.

I have always followed quietly,

at first as I was taught,

later out of loyalty,

and now in futility.

Unlike Lot’s wife, I will not allow my life

to be consumed by bitterness at the past destroyed.

But it percusses at the Welcoming teas

As I sit paralyzed by discomfort

A plate of crumb cake on my lap

amid the pitying looks.

And it clamors at the half glances of the secretaries

above their typewriters in the Principal’s office

as I wait to discuss my daughter’s new school problems.

And it echoes within my pauses in interviewers’ offices

as I stammer the zigzags of my resume.

I am weary of following.

I had wanted a home of fireplaces and dinnertimes

And 10 pm chats after the kids have gone to sleep.

I dream no longer

And home is just a place that I am too tired to leave,

but I will follow no more.