In my head, this poem is already titled.
It’s terrible practice to title a poem before writing,
at least it doesn’t do me any good -
A disorganized, stream-of-consciousness writer will be limited by a title if the title comes before the writing.
There’s a metaphor there maybe.
About deciding how things are gonna end up and adding weight,
shape,
food coloring,
substance,
meaning to your version of events without considering the infinite, tedious branches of time and meandering possibility.
We bury ourselves, is what I mean, by titling it before knowing how it goes.
Now that that’s been addressed, and stay with me because there is method here, onto the meat and potatoes of the thing:
The many flavors of goodbye.
An elusive creature, Goodbye.
You know what it is; there are examples that volunteer unbidden in our memories.
Still, even with clearly defined edges,
A goodbye wriggles out of our grasp a little
When we hold onto it too tightly.
Or it becomes cluttered, muddled with past and future partings,
When really, each goodbye belongs only to its moment and nothing and no where else.
If you’re like me, a goodbye skitters away when you look directly at it,
Leaving only a shimmering impression,
An unfulfilled opportunity to share a piece of your secret intangible insides.
If you’re like me, it hits you and slides to the ground unacknowledged, where it stays
gathering regret,
until you find it in a dusty corner one day and hold it finally to your chest,
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
People are ******* woefully messy,
we’re flawed and broken and vulnerable in the extreme,
Soft little mammals awake within ourselves against our will.
Doomed to loss
To pain
Fear
The unpleasant trappings of our station in abundant, endlessly accessible supply.
There’s a trick though,
They don’t tell you this,
A trick to surviving without the beating heart that you could swear lived in you too, for a blissful miraculous moment.
Ready? Let’s see if I can find the right melody; the Knowing doesn’t often lend itself to casual plainness.
People only go as far as you let them
And if we’re all waiting in line to shuffle off this blah blah blah
We can hold our goodbyes in the space where they should be, in line with us.
Not as an empty pocket of wishes and heartaches
But as the flesh and blood of our own self,
our own beating heart.
So that when those moments stun us,
Knock us backward out of our seat with unbearable force of longing, crushing in the cosmic weight of their suddenness;
when a cardinal, say, visits your mother’s old rose bushes
You can remember and unbind the reserve of space inside you
Let them walk ****** in
And sit for awhile.
The title of the poem is “On Goodbye,”
The title I prematurely chose
And the poem that followed which attempts to wrangle a wild, unyieldingly ferocious beast by treating it like a friendly stray dog.
It’s wishful, and I wish it for you, too:
That the minerals in your blood rearrange themselves into the shape a cardinal, say,
And I’ll carry you with me, too,
Until we meet again.