Justification of madness

Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. If you don't start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who'll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I'm not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you'll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven't lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived.

~ William Parrish from the movie, Meet Joe Black

True lovers run into strange capers

I forgot you once, I will forget you again
I loved you once, I can love you again.

If it be so,
then I might
forget you and love you
love you and forget you

over and over and over
again and again
until
the tears run clear
the kisses unfold
the warmth ices
over into hell
and nothing
is left

until
there is
nothing more to love
or nothing left to forget.

Reflections - three times a day

i. 1930
I press one lid down and
line my eyes black thickly, darkly
till they look bigger than usual and
my lashes are lusciously curly, crimped with heat
from the hairdryer,
mascara-ed with waterproof ink -
I can see that they are now
framed well:
bigger, better, brighter.

ii. 0230
I stare at that strange girl who stares back,
who looks like she stepped out of a Tim Burton cartoon
with her huge, red swollen lips
big round half crazed eyes dark with pain
and skin bulging pink with alcohol:
they are are stricken with horror -
at the indian man in her hazy memory
the jug of vodka redbull
the throbbing in her ears
the distinct sensation of forgetting
and the horror of the ugly image she sees
of herself,
not herself.

iii. 1230
By daylight, normalcy has crept back
through the curtains and the windows and the grill
and the bath and the wash up and the water
has cleaned away the corruption of the night.
What remains are:
the smell of vomit
lids heavy with heat
the bloated image in her mind's eye
and souls temporarily blessed
with a drugged nothingness.

"Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears. When they finish, they feel better. But to those without hope, like Homer, whose anguish is basic and permanent, no good comes from crying. Nothing changes for them. They usually know this, but still can't help crying".
- Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

I guess I still have hope.

Tonight I can write the cruelest lines

Write, for example,'I was idiotic enough
to imagine that you loved me,
and I sort of felt sorry for you".

The night wind is placid but cruel.

Tonight I can confess the meanest truths
He said he loved me, and I said I "sometimes" loved him too.

Through nights like this one he held me in his arms
We kissed again and more behind the Sheares Hall walls.

I loved him "maybe" and he loved me true,
How could one not have loved that crazy hair and perfect lashes
and goateed chin and clear sad eyes.
I think I may well be a Jew.

To think that I have lost him.
But he lost me too.
Tonight I must write the truest lines:
"Clearly, we had no sense of direction".

To hear the dreaded silence, still more empty without him
I wish the verse fell to the soul like dew to the pasture
but I am surfeited on images and my soul yearns for things:

noel coward, text messages, homework,
alcohol, gym, food,
men, poetry and tears.

Oh, it matters, it mattered,
that my reticent love could not keep him.
(I wonder if sex could have)
The heart is shattered and he is not with me.

This is all. My heart is a vacuum and it cannot sing.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost him.
My sight has to be restrained so I do not stalk him on Facebook,
My heart looks for him and his is not looking for mine.

I finally admit I love him, that's certain, and now I must stop.
It was already too late when I whispered it in his ear
My voice no longer speaks because it is sick of itself
and also because he no longer hears me.

Another's. He is already another's. Like my kisses before.
His voice. His bright body (Unfortunate pun). His infinite fragility.
His unrestrained sexuality.
His impertinence and cowardliness. His fear and insecurity.
His idiotic ambition. His perpetual broodiness.
Thank god, they are not mine.
I wish they were still mine.

I cannot love him anymore, that's certain, and maybe I won't.
Or never did.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this once I held him in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost him.

This will not be the last pain I make myself suffer:
I also make others read
these verses I write for him.
Please do not find this.
I didn't write this for you.
And you will never know, like many other things,
he will never know.

Photographic Evidence

A sinister grin on your face
an exaggerated expression of despair on mine
tilting your goateed face down
lifting my asymetrical head up.
with a sideways glance at the camera
half looking at you.
your hands clasped together in a prayer
my arms locked around your thick waist.

Honestly,
we looked like complete idiots.

We posed like this for the exchange student
I know we both secretly hated;
this is the only picture of us together.
It is a good picture.
That was how we looked like in love.

On the love a blind man receives

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete.

To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,--few felicities equal this.

The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake--let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self, this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it.

- Les Miserables, Victor Hugo