I was speaking to a woman struggling with a breakup and found myself saying to her, “What do you think we (meaning men) actually have that you need so badly?” Short of a good job and lots of money where maybe she doesn’t have any, I can’t really think of much, but the man she is troubled by is not one like that. He doesn’t have those things and further, she has two children and the usual baggage. What man with all that is going to fall at her feet and give her the release from the burdens she carries and thinks she needs? Wow. I think this woman is hugely attractive just all by herself. Talk about cutting my own predatory throat (I have nothing you need). Time to grow up, I guess. Growing up in public is a bitch. Ick.
Where You Planted Me
You have taken me,
taken the true heart of me,
you say, giving me
an old space in your
new garden, just there beside
the Goodnight Roses,
where you last planted
iridescent dragon bones
and grew last year's dreams,
annuals. I hope
as you water me that I'll
be perennial.
June 14, 2009 7:18 AM
Contraction
1 week ago
Its not the materialistic, actually. I always saw my last boyfriend as a catapult towards loosening me up, letting go of the ridiculous control I always subject myself to. Yes, there's no reason why I couldn't do it by myself without him being an important part of my life, but it just made things so much easier then.
ReplyDeleteIn retrospect, the hard way would have beaten the easy way's butt. 6 months after the break up, I still search about for myself and have only recently begun to believe, I don't need someone else to be who I want to be.
Part and parcel of finding myself - another lesson on this journey, it all boils down to this.
And that's the point, I think. If I define myself contingent on my woman, you on your man, I beleive there is something not healthy in that.
ReplyDeleteI write poetry very close to something like worship of love and lovers. You might think that I want fantasy to win in the love arena but I am really not that way. I believe that we cannot really participate in the big loves without a strong realistic ground. It is true that I wish magic and fantasy to have a strong place but not before reality. Instead I wish it along with reality. We are going to have to be okay doing the dishes and worrying about money because that's what our life will contain, dirty dishes and bills not easy to pay.
I cannot really back your play as you flower, well I can in some ways as my former girlfriend does with her latest "projects", getting two Mexican young men through college, two brothers, one of whom she adopted legally along the way. She adopted the young opera singer, taking him to Canada to go to school and is also subsidizing his older brother at a Mexican university in Engineering. I could maybe do something like that too in some other world, but not this one. I don't have the money or the will. She doesn't really have the money either but she organizes.
I just tell that to show the possibility but I can't do that. It is not my destiny to undertake such a thing. Normally we don't do these things for anyone but our children perhaps. So expecting a lover to help in some similar way is over the top. For most of us, we walk alongside, as my wife did when she talked me into finishing my schoolwork and graduating in my bachelor's degree.
It did not go well for her. She expected more of it, that more would spill her way from it somehow. That happened again when she walked with me thorugh getting sober two years later. She expected more of it would spill her way then too. Again that did not happen. She never really broke free of something false in the whole business. I still don't quite get what all happened in that life's exchange between us. We started in the lead up to and by getting her through college and starting her social work career, and I was busy building my own thing in mechanical design as my part. She was okay with that, I think, but later she wanted us to be something we were not. She ended up in a very difficult and ultimately lethal place.
The poem is truely bautiful.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should just keep it at that. Somewhere in all the other talk you say; someone to walk alongside... that's true, but:)
for me, that's what i would think, but then i know there is more, maybe you say that too, when you say something unhealthy. I being an angel:), can indeed stand on my own, but i am no angel i am here on planet earth, and i.....haven't figured it out yet.
I think more women/people should be asked that question more often. I think one of the problems is the ending of any relationship, howsoever, leaves a grief which people too easily try to assuage by filling it with another love.
ReplyDeleteIf it doesn't end in disaster and there you are together just about OK, perennial as you say, with the dishes and the bills, there'll still come a point when you have to decide where you want to go for yourself, even with the other oner along side. I kind of grieve a bit sometimes for an elusive, if not departed magic, but perhaps you can keep finding that in unexpected places.
I really like this one, especially those 'irridescent dragon bones'!
This one is ragged, isn't it? That's because it is on the tip of my own life just as it is yours. It doesn't fold up into a neat package when told this way. I am not supposed to have any predatory nature, but I do. Women shouldn't be gold diggers, but they are. I am not only predatory. Women are also generous. We all actually love. Fantasy actually appears and has a good effect. Reality is stubborn and darkens us all. The dirt persists and must be cleaned and recleaned. If this is not precisely what you hunger for, then it is all in the way of what you do hunger for.
ReplyDeleteI am very grateful I have learned to let those parts of me that interfere actually play out within me without much appearance in my life any more. I hunger after a woman's beauty and rape and pillage occurs to me but I act with decorum and civility. I have succeeded at that for a long time now. It is nearly second nature to act this way even as the other is second nature still.
I have one advantage. I genuinely like women pretty much just as they are. I am grateful for this. I have no crap relationships dangling from my karma. This same is true now in much of my life. I have lost nearly all ridiculous hungers except for food itself.
There are as many different motivations for any one woman at any point in her day. One truth does not negate the prior one but bet my bottom dollar, there are more than one truth for just her, never mind all of woman kind.
ReplyDeleteI can't help but think screw the bills and sing over dishes, and then fall in a heap of poetry. But you're right, it just doesn't work that way. And for this, I am very sad. But mostly, in denial:)
xo
erin
Erin, you can't really be in denial if you can declare yourself there. You can be in rebellion or resistance, however. Denial means you actually believe your own bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI do resist certain parts of reality. Just recently my health has taken a turn and I am toying with actively refusing to accept that this is happening, no matter that I know it is. I refuse to think for now that the asthma of my childhood is returning after fifty years asthma free. I will not live like that. Period.