Friday, August 14, 2009

The End Of The Affair, Alien Dreams

I have told this story before. This is as straight up as I can tell it.

The End Of The Affair

I promised I would.
I said take me and do it
like that, tear my heart
right out if you must
because it matters to me
that you have your truth,
knowing that it would
not be me she chose. After
two years she sent me

away.

February 4, 2009 8:43 PM

**************************

When I was ten I started to dream I was from some other world. I mean that literally. I wake from most dreams knowing that they are not about any place that I recognize from my life, this even when I recognize people. Most often I don't even know the people. I felt so alienated at ten that I couldn't make sense of belonging here. I have been searching ever since for ways to make sense of my situation. When I was 21 God intervened. Because of that the story I pursue dramatically changed. The search has not. I feel blessed that such a thing happened, feel that without it I would have failed utterly. This poem recalls an attitude that is real even if the story is not.

Alien Dreams

I am heart wrapped, stoned
by the presence of more lies
than truth, I admit.
Buried in sandstone
stories of the way it ought
to be if this was
the home world you said
I'm from, and I agree I'm
not from here, by God.

February 5, 2009 2:08 PM

11 comments:

  1. Funny, I've been thinking about this very stuff today. I too experienced a similar thing, I think I was 5 or so, and then again at 36.....I don't really think this me is either of those same me's. Not at all. Where we come from, logic makes no sense.

    Ahhh, but we try hard :)

    xxx

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  2. Wow. Let's go home, Michelle. Oh. Still something to do. Yes.

    Ghost, not me. That's my brother. He took a different direction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. At least you had two years. They must have been good years. Looking back it may not seem like long enough but lots of people don't ever have even one good year with someone.
    Ghost Dansing finds the greatest pics and videos, huh!!!

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  4. Techno, first I had several young loves, then an affair of two years, then married for over twenty, then an affair of two years, and then another settled relationship of nearly five years. Now I am solitary.

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  5. of course you feel
    you don't belong

    you don't belong

    you are not one of us
    a mere simian
    in ancestral line

    not us
    not us

    we are beyond you
    transhuman
    obermensch
    obermensch

    we are above you
    superior
    superior

    evolution's crown
    spliced
    genetochine

    precise movement
    the Swiss Watch

    in unity
    in harmony
    all one

    grinding
    human remains
    on wheels of time
    with pointed sprockets
    tearing flesh from bone
    then incinerated
    with efficiency
    efficiency

    we are not jou
    we are not jou

    millions
    millions
    millions

    you are dead
    dead

    we have killed you
    killed you

    we are beyond you
    we are human no more

    we of the totenkopf

    we are dead

    human alienation

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  6. I wonder how many of us feel alien? Really, I don't believe there are many. I think that most are quite content to button up and plug in. And then there are those that struggle, that fringe, that recognize the something more.

    I don't like the word affair. We've made it negative. I don't think that is always the case.

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  7. Ghost, indeed. I am barely alive, a mere wraith weaving in and out of the mainstream of factory effluvia, reaching for some form of meaning in the dispersal of the smoke, barely creeping through the airstream, tacking the gusts and billows, a tuft of barely aliveness thinking about nothing of my own and little of yours in the sheen of metallic chrome domes.

    Erin, there is the alien thing and there is the awake thing. Not many are alien. Not many are awake. These circles do not coincide but they do overlap some.

    As for the word affair, I surely understand your point and it is my own. However, I have taken the hard knock lessons on this point. When my actions are of this nature, many people get to weigh in on things. I think the term is a group defined term, and those offended tend the definitions. An affair will always be an affair to those offended by it. Struggling against that is a fool's game. It is far better to keep discreet than to try to explain how this particular affair is so rich and meaningful that in this case it is so much more than that. Even if it is true, the offended group do not care.

    Even my mother pointed out that if you want to rob banks then you had better train up at bank robbing and find out if you have the character for it. She didn't think I had the character for it, was her point. But I do have the character for affairs, I guess. I have had two, and both were so much more than that. In one case the husband knew from the outset. That was strange. In the other case the husband never found out. That was deeply right. Both lasted two years.

    I was deeply in love both times. I believe the husbands are the primary definers as the offended parties, not me as the lover, nor especially the woman in the middle, even though she directly contributed. The right behavior is of course divorce first, not the other way around.

    Of course these were affairs. Would I do them again? Certainly. Is this normal behavior for me? Let's see...two in a lifetime, reaching past 63 years, and never against my own wife. I do not know what my wife actually did, never cared to find out. I think they were fated, and less than ten percent of my life span, but bigger in my heart than most things I have done, including my marriage. I have no way of answering except to say in total confidence that I am not a predator. I have certainly been accused of being one.

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  8. She sent you away. Do you think you set yourself up for heartbreak? I thought I recognized something of myself in that one, some vaguely masochistic fatalism.

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  9. Rachel, of course it was a set up, chasing the extremes of romance, completely out of my league and having the chance to bring my fantasy into being for a time, knowing it would end, would hurt, and declaring the present moments worth all future changes.

    She was beautiful and modestly rich, graceful and playful, dramatic and erotic, and she fit to a tee an inner template of royalty, one to bow to and pledge my troth. She was of course far more and also far less than that. I have no shame about this two year timelessness in my life. It changed me. I could not be the poet I am today without this experience as the deep foundation of my love. I worked hard against the certainty of my loss and then accepted it when it came as I knew it would.

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  10. Wow Ghost....oh my.

    Yes indeed Christopher, something to do.

    xxx

    ReplyDelete

The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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