One of these days I pray that I have the talent to do it over. Do it right.
There are more poems written about love than every other topic combined. Or, at least that's what it feels like some times, this time of year in particular. My countdown to the most tedious day of the calender year started on Monday the seventh when I couldn't avoid hearing about it any longer.
That was the first time in over three hundred and sixty days that I commented on how appropriate it was to paste up hearts to commemorate a massacre. I get a lot of blank stares in February.
It was worse in high school, of course, when the gooey sentimentality was squeezed down hallways designed in the sixties until there was barely enough room for me, let alone the gawking fat girl that never seemed to go to class, just make me late for mine. Not like it's news really, not like anyone ever accused high school of being anything like real life.
Even though the hallway between advanced English and World War II has expanded now, to the width of Hennepin Avenue, it still feels like every February fourteenth the worst parts of high school come seeping out again. I just want to go hide in the theater with the rest of the cynics, but it's true what Tom said to the audience from his rickety fire escape. Time truly is the greatest distance between two places. The same goes for people.
Hell, I remember when it was the real world that found the cracks in our prison shaped illusions. It was my sophomore year that sounded like a Hold Steady song, it was that year that two boys died (no, neither one was crucified, they were shot. This is why no one writes poetry about death, not really) but that wasn't the year that everything changed, not for me anyway.
It was my senior year that started with us watching our friend die. It was my senior year that was punctuated with suicide attempts (none of them mine, none of the competent ones at any rate) and late night, panicked phone calls. It was that year that I first hated someone with a dead cold passion and it was that year that I learned the true cost of bitterness, the horrible truth that you have only so long in which to apologize, to make amends. It was the best year of my life.
I told you, I get weird looks.
I've tried to write about that year, and maybe one day I will be smart enough or talented enough to draw on those experiences. Maybe somewhere down the line I'll have processed the emotions, internalized the truths, maybe then I'll be able to do justice to the wind swept winter nights spent waiting for the bus, in Uptown, with the friends that were nearer to me than family and looking forward to a night spent in my home away from home.
Eventually, perhaps, I can capture the delicate, tragic beauty of those trips to the psych ward, to visit the boy, man now, that taught me how to hug with feeling. The way his cheekbones stood out in his face, painfully gaunt. How fragile he seemed, not allowed to touch anyone.
Maybe I can explain why I cried like a child, with my head in the lap of a man that I hadn't seen in months when at last he left the state.
I can't though, not now.
The greatest literary exertion of which my skills are worthy is to recount, however briefly, that evening of September twenty-third, mere hours after death.. We gathered then, the cynics and the freaks, his friends and the ones that loved him (even if I had denied it for too long) in the living room that I came to see as the heart of tangle-town.
There was food, and music, laughter and tears. At points one could have mistaken it for a party, if it weren't for the red eyes that ringed the room. It would seem normal for stretches, until one of us would break and begin to cry and then we would flock to them, putting our arms around their shoulders, or just getting a hand through the scrum to touch a knee.
Most of them I knew, some few of them I didn't, but we were then, all of us in that room one by shared loss. One by spilled blood.
I wasn't there when he was struck, I didn't really watch him die, I didn't know. I did read the statement of the most loyal soul I know, and he was right behind him that morning. I can tell you why no one writes poems about death. It's because there's no metaphor in being dragged for a block beneath the wheels of an Asian Foods delivery truck and there's no meter in a humans last desperate cries.
You can't construct a rhyme scheme around wordless whimpers, and there's no good imagery in the loss of bodily control. Most importantly though, the poets don't want to admit that your last cries aren't for loved ones, they aren't comprised of one enigmatic word. In the end all you want is for the pain to stop.
Let the poets stick to love, death has formed for me bonds far stronger. Infinitely more pure.
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