Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
It’s hard to meet someone serious at college. Everyone’s busy,
self-centeredly grinding away at their dreams. So much so that
people tell you to not even try (especially as a freshman).

I was mostly at ease with myself—as a freshman. I had an
excellent skincare routine—it was downright luxuriant, and it
kept me going, through that romantically baren and lonely year.

But we humans hope—we buy lotto tickets to dream on—though we know the awful math. We Gen Z’s seem to have our own unique brand of loneliness, born of covid and Internet-age experience.

My romantic expectations, sophomore year, were low—ok, unmeasurable.

Looking around was depressing. There were socially awkward STEM majors, jocks, frat men (sure the world’s laid-out just for them) and ‘CSOM Bros" (business majors more interested in parlaying my Grandmère’s money than me) and the elusive, emotionally reserved, ‘regular guys.’

But the unexpected can happen. We all know how crowded campus coffee shops are—the students move in and out in tides as noisy as the real, salty ocean. And then there you were, a rumpled, 25-year-old doctoral student—from another world—asking to share my table.

The loudest thing in that room was your sense of stillness. You seemed to be a new and distinct species, and as we talked, you seemed to somehow smooth my anxious edges. After a few meets, the thought, ‘I really like this guy,’ seemed to have its own gravity.

We somehow managed to thread the ‘too busy to care’ dynamic, and as time went by, you helped me channel my absurd, fiery, pastel-painted, first-love, early-twenty girlhood heat into something longer lasting, deep and authentic. Congratulations! It’s been two years.

Separating now, would be like removing the salt from the sea.
.
.
Songs for this:
Playing House by Kudu
So Much Mine by The Story
After Last Night by The Revlons
BLT Merriam Webster word of the day challenge 01/16/25:
Parlay = to use something to get something of greater value.
on a stage, guitars strumming a tune that
can only be hummed, for it has no verses
the songwriters, their tongues entwined,
joined as one, they can speak no words

but the crowd roars its favor,, sheds its de light, stomping and whooping it up, making
all the necessary noises, of two tongues, yes’m, entwining

kinda like a kissing, a little of hissing too,,
got its own rhythm, even the noises rhyming,
a rock n roll ballad with country western
mixed in, some say it sounds like Joan Baez
singing **** Jagger, or an Avett Brothers
serenade

words need tongues for formaytion,
tongues needed to speak, but absent
a common language,tongues do what
tongues do best,
intertwining, combining, licking,
making love noises that requires
two to be
heard
fulfilling
taste of two
blending
and we
though
silent
pronounce
ourselves
as one,
the loveliest
unspoken
vocabulary
Sabbath 7:31am Jan 11, 2025
<•>
For later, forecast proclaims:

snow showers for much of the day,
but in our temperate clime, rarely
do we get inches or feats of accumulation,
but it will be chill enough to turn my
heavy duty “Icer” navy coat to its
whiteout version, where the flakes
individually attach themselves to
to fat fabric for self-preservation,
displaying their distinct DNA patterns of intricate crystallization artwork on a
gallery of me…

assuredly, some will attach to eyelashes
and extruded tongue, perhaps inhaled,
in nostril and open mouth, as I employ
all my senses to retain, retrain, my brain,
to walk alongside a saltwater estuary that
welcomes every flake as a long lost son and
daughter, who has returned from its prodigal global journey around the world, to melt back into a mother’s currents embrace, returning
home to my patch of briefly occupied spatial, white palatial existence

I anticipate the taste of snow to be a
multi~flavored cone, souvenirs, accrued
while globe trotting, with hints ofAsian
spices, on a riverbed of Italian red
peppery tomato sauce, the crusty
spicy fabric of the fried chickpeas of the Middle East, the cilantro stinging of Latin continents,and pretend that my nature
wetted cheeks  are so because I cry & walk alone, sadness flavored, wishing I could partake of this snowy journey repast, with you by my side, for how much better would this global travelled whirlpool repast  of white ice and scented airs, tastes if it could be joyfully shared

but I am by myself,
sensibly refused companionship
by others, and my
voyaged meditation now,
well ended,
well recall,
Whitman’s Song of Myself (1) conclusion:
                          
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self


join me?
(1).  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version
entombed to die together.,

prisoner utters these words to
their lover~companion,
who has joined him freely, and
that conceptual, hardly casual,
resonates, pinging my sonar
brain long after the famous
opera concludes, leading me
unforced to the writing table…

Saturday 2:1l:25 9:27AM

now, after having lived and
loved for well over 25,000 days,
there is much data to review
much of it corrupt & corrupted,
and of course, it must be done
man-u-ally (manually), and
will require filtering to edit
out the natural edits that the
fog of war, time, and the innate
human desire to improve one’s
recorded history, I conclude;

Not only have I loved others
desperately,

beyond reason and sensibility,
but more than once,
more than twice,
more than my
faltering courage dare confess…

remembering the physical manifestations, is almost eerily too easy,
to recall the angst, physicality
of loving too well,
heart chested pain worthy of a doctor visit,
desperate hunger feeding on/off
of depression costuming as dreary sadness,
but so overtaking that I am the
cliche of the human berefetted of
all energy, except for periodic moaning,
visitors refused, sleeplessness my
only steady companion

writing worse poetry
than this,
dialing, hanging up, repeatedly,
paths crossing in hallways,
and breaking me down to
aching breaking pieces

later,
when all grownup,
deserted wife and children
for the restoration of another
woman’s love,
but dragged down by
actions & inactions,
she wearied of my agoniste
and left me to
treble tremble when the weight
of the load, they/I
put right on me

now, sipping my morning 3-cuppa of
Caribbean brown beans,
my fresh eyes tearing,
my internal tearing
myself up/down,
half in mocking, half in sympathy
for the lost soul once was,
no longer desperate
but nonetheless joyous that
more than once I was mired
in a state so encompassing
and compressing,
was overruled overrun
overcome
with the gain and the pain
of loving desperately
and happy contented
that it shall not happily happen again,
for my poor heart already repaired
by a heart surgeon,
but with damage left from
life’s and loving’s accidents and accumulations, muscles weakened,
parts clogged with memories
beyond repair,
if loving desperately should come back
one last time,
winking, he’s thinking, ha,
for last licks,

*!it would be in a closing act sorta way,
a great fitting fitful accomplishment to die,
one last time, desperately in love!
~Jan. 9, 2025~NYC
<•>
The words of Walt Whitman (1)



~~~~
The origin of all poems!

Oh what a sweeping promise
does Whitman, proffer,
you to entice, to succor.
ease out from within yourself,
that which is therein ready,,
to organize
what be the
fermenting stack of seeded cells of
fomenting
stacked
multiple
simultaneous
observations,
poetry lurking, thine owned senses,
a catalyst cataloging constantly
and you happily despair  to
capture, retain, s u s t a i n,
the pieces of a whole that
knowing only you possess,
that only you can
perfect as the combo
expression of
your
pre~owned assembly
as a solitary protagonist, witness,
and audience!

Understand the origins of the poem,
because it is
original to you,
comprehension of this principle,
means that you will never be
starved for inspiration,
record the ordinary and the peculiar,
the off drink that when mixed,

shaken and stirred
that only you
can pour and better yet ,
s h a r e!
(1) Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
“ Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”
LA burns, smoke blackens sky,
people flee and abandon cars,
90 and 100 mile an hour winds
feed and fan the flames, people
losing everything, even being
rich, or famous cannot save their
big homes and life's possessions.
Someplace in that expanding,
raging inferno my son, an Oregon
Fire Chief leads 300 Firefighters
and their 75 engines and water tenders
over 900 miles south into the fire storm.
Along with firefighters from other
states. Mutual support needed & rendered.

One of my son's firemen is his own son,
and my 21year old rookie grandson
with a little over one year on the job.
His seasoned father has fought many
battles with all kinds of fires, he set to
retire in May after 30 years on the job.
He has seen it all, with never a scratch
or a "singe", but my grandson has never
experienced anything of this magnitude,
being one of a 4-man truck crew battling
side by side in the belly of a raging beast.

All these 30 years I've worried for my son's
safety, now it starts anew, for our boy barely
a man that now walks in his father's shoes.

I will not sleep well until they are all
home safely. I grieve for the victims
of this awful tragedy.
When others run away from fires,
or danger these rare breeds run
towards them, firefighters and
police unselfish public servants.
And we would all be in deep
Doodoo without them.
Next page