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

We are going
To die and
That makes us
The lucky ones

In the teeth
Of these
Stupefying
Odds, it is
You and I
In our
Ordinariness
That are here

The needle won't
Reach the record
And that's ok
We reach for
What to say
As the silence
Grows too strong
Yet nothing ever
Remains within
Forever is
Far too long

-Odd personalities.

We are
As
Contrasting
In
Nature
As the
Summer Heat
Is from the
Winter Snow.

on some benches, people never sat
on some there was always someone.

on some branches, birds never rested
on some there was always a one.

don’t worry my boy,
life is not a bench or a branch
but a park and a tree.

Ted Slade was a Communist, an Atheist,
a Realist, a Pragmatist. All the ‘ists’…
Even as you’d see from his poetry…. a perfectionist.!
So, right to be bitter now and then,
about how the so called maker made him.
I’m right there with him on that.

How can there be a superior being… The Big ‘G’
The creator of all things living and breathing
when, he dished out the proletariat’s grand life plans…
The stoop, the damaged flesh, retracted blood and bone,
the twisted hands.

After he’d fixed the sun,
the moon and the stars
and the creatures of the sea,
he made man in his image… his own
the likes of you and me.
But Ted picked up a duff one,
an already beaten body.
Spine twisted, lungs restricted.
Unfit for purpose - ****** up.

Like a life jacket with a puncture
If he had jumped overboard with it
he would have drowned.
He’d picked up the parcel in the warehouse
that had already hit the ground.
One that shouldn’t have made it beyond quality control.
If he’d had a hand in a design that was plainly odd
he would have chosen the super deluxe model for his starring role
So he just ignored everybody else’s God
Just got on with the job…
And as such, scored an even more brilliant goal!

Some strange arrangement
of molecules would make me?
When I am nothing more
than a temporary ripple in time and space
Just flickering impulses that,
allow me to perceive my
place.
Simply a mass of messy wires
swimming in a cocktail of chemicals
that accounts for all I feel?

So I say, can science explain:
The depths of a poets words,
the burning desire for artists to
explode color into stationary life,
or the soulful dance of a melody merging
with ones very being?

Yes, well then

What of the hidden glimmer of life
sparkling in each creation's eyes?
What of the realms of things unseen
and so often only felt
for the faintest moments?

Would recycled carbon on its own,
that has drifted for eons, somehow
rearrange to form life?
Would billions of chaotically
                                    colliding particles
embrace so harmoniously that
the overly comedic conditions for life
would so seamlessly come together
that at this very moment
you and I,
two beings of impossible odds
could have our paths combine
that I could write these words
that they could wander there way to you