To all those suffering today
Write it down
Sometimes suffering sounds beautiful

“Don't you miss being in love?”, she asks.
I simmer, gathering myself  and my thoughts.

No, I don't, because I have not been in love;
Not in the manner I imagine it.
I have loved - beautifully, might I add -
But never have I been in love.

How can I have?
At my best, all I knew was to compel, persuasively,
someone into loving me -
the best possible way I knew how.
I revealed just enough of myself,
the beautiful of myself,
the parts of me that drew butterflies.

Hidden were the broken parts of me,
those which keep me awake, sleepless -
'til the moon kisses me goodnight,
in the last hours before dawn.

I am not, by any means, denying ever loving.
I have loved, blindly and beautifully.
All I have ever been good at was loving -
loving someone into loving me,
the best way possible.

But, all of their love was inadequate.
A love which always fell short of loving me,
the best way possible.

Love; inadequate:
Unable to express loving me,
unable to express themselves of loving me.

In turn,
I was slapped with sloppy efforts of loving me -
Vague inadequacies of love.
It was never enough, not remotely close,
to what I had imaged loving me would be.
It was short of ever arousing me internally,
short of wits to spiral me into being in love.

And so, how can I miss being in love,
when it has always been a feeling that eluded me?
How can I miss being in love, when in love -
I concealed the broken parts of me?
How can I have been in love when I was lonely, in love?

How can I have been in love,
when all I knew of being in love was to love myself -
by loving whomever loved the aesthetic parts of me?

Loving me has always been an infatuation -
an infatuation of the broken pieces of me,
coming together to create an illusion of a love -
an unsatisfactory love for loving me.

How can I have ever been in love when no one has known,
expressed, conjured the best possible way of loving me.
All of me.

Once more, up at the last hours before dawn -
awaiting the moon to kiss me goodnight, I tell her.

when presented with an old photo of myself ( which hardly happens at all)
I have no emotion connect
the person who wore that skin has gone
dissolved to an ever thinning thread
snap shot memories come and go
and I never picture myself alive back when
or where someone captured a moment with a click
and kept the photograph best known to themselves.

life is a soup
and you don't get to choose its flavour
sweet or sour you **** it from a spoon
it dribbles down your chin
and stains your freshly washed shirt

so the only answer you get
don't worry about your shirt.

there are many ancient walled cities
when men were brutal with a sword
now men are just as brutal with tongues

You can find The Biology Of Strangeness  and my other books at my Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.com/author/mikeessig. You can get print or ebook. Read for free with Amazon Prime.

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Here is a chance to feed a poet’s starving cat. Not as much fun as sleeping with the poet, but more important.

Off to Minnesota to my God Son’s wedding. See you on Thursday. :) Mike

still as a statue timeless
I can hear the Earth breathing
kiss the hand that loves me
with lips pressed to her skin
I move in and out
with each eternal heartbeat
listening to the rise and fall
rise and fall of every tide turning.