Something sweet December 2012

  

About a poem from, April 12, 2012

 

I don’t know how valid any of those poems she sent me via email were back then, whether it was fantasy or fallacy, whether I was deluding myself or not.

But they made it clear that she felt no need to disguise their meaning the way she seemed to do with poems she posted on her public site.

I look back at them with more of a skeptical eye than I did when I received them, or perhaps I suspected even then that they were not as sincere as they seemed, when I wanted them to be.

Now, with so much water having passed under the bridge on which I stand, with some many other angrier poems, with so many poems with meaning heavily disguised, those poems she sent seem both innocent and manipulative.

They make me feel sad, and they make me feel sorry for not having handled the whole thing better – whatever better means.

The poem she sent on April 12 is a perfect example of this, something she called “Poem for you and for myself.”

“I want to climb inside your eyes and stay a while, to recharge,” she wrote. “The shine that usually resides inside my soul that oft grows hard.”

A sexual reference perhaps?

“And while inside, just for a time or two times, maybe three times mor, I would reclaim it for myself and for you too, as what's in store.”

The poem clearly foreshadowed some great promise that later never materialized, sabotaged by me, I think, because I really wasn’t ready or wasn’t mature enough to fully understand its implications.

“For those who use each other up and those who, selfishly, decide to heal themselves they first must sup and suck another poor soul dry,” she wrote. “Is never knowing what true love or what its cousin, friendship, means, and they will, endless, others, shove to misery with them, it seems.”

In rereading the poem now, I can see that it wasn’t completely bullshit, and it wasn’t completely as unmasked as I thought at the time, the sexual inuendo cleverly inserted, but not as blatantly as the German bar poem she’d sent a few days earlier.

Like everything since, there seems to have been a grain of sincerity, perhaps even a sense of innocence hidden behind the hard shell of her sexual practicality. It seems in retrospect that on some level she legitimately meant it, and that inside her, then and later, a battle waged, an almost Blake-like struggle to recover innocence, the idea that innocence untested is worthless, and that we must temper innocence with experience in order for it to survive.

Now, at the end of a year that I will likely remember for the rest of my life, that sense of innocence and experience seems to linger on my tongue, slightly sweet, despite all of the sourness that came after it.


email to Al Sullivan

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