Essays: On the Poetry of Love
It's meaningless without you. But ironically, this was written in your absence.
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There is so much to explore in our connection, let alone you, another multifaceted, human being; complex and intricately woven with the threads of divine beauty. Each interaction flourishes into its own secret, awaiting to be discovered.
Should I leave all of this behind to pursue something so unequivocally meaningless, tasteless, bitter, lonely, and ephemeral as material wealth?
Should I give up exploring your endless, visceral plains and valleys and meadows and mountains and perfectly clear basins that humble the wonders of the world just to do what everyone else is doing?
Should I sacrifice your depths, and my tools; the chisel of language, and the mallet of endearing curiosity, to live in a mediocre dimension?
Should I bury the wonders of your existence with a 12-hour job and a struggle just because that is what is normal? For $80,000? For an eventual six-figure salary after two decades and a loss of identity? For stability? Health insurance that waives copays when we go for our annual physicals and biannual dentist check-ups? Is that worth it? Or is a more "balanced" approach preferred?
What does that mean?
Knowing less of your profundities for material security and ease? Being less in exchange for more [materialistic] things?
What does that mean?
"Just in case something happens in the future"? I baptized my heart in the river of postmodern paranoia, only for it to become ugly and pathetically weak-sighted. I decapitated my imagination, amputated my inclinations, and splintered the vessels that you once flowed through - for physical ease. What a crime - a sin. An unforgivable enormity.
Let's flee from this incompatibility. From this lifestyle of misery and gloom, that usurps our king and fills our depths with a bottomless crave for superficial desires that are never fulfilled.
Give me something more.
I want something more than money, and stability, and ease. I want something greater - what lay lodged within us. That thing that we may never reach because of the timelessness of our time being wasted on trying to free up our time?
What lay lodged, deep within us
that necessitates human exploration into the darkest beauties of our own selves -arguably just as mysterious, awe-invoking, and enlivening than space travel, if not more.
What lay lodged, deep within us,
requiring a profound level of human connection to access, which, unfortunately, we no longer have the patience to unlock in this modern world.
When do I have time to think - to write like this? When can I feel like this if I only have a few minutes until the next "thing" I have to do spawns like a demonic aneurysm?
There is no cure, except for severance, with the shears forged from the metals of our own curiosity. But some of us - many of us - can not mine, because our tools are used to climb out of that wondrous reality, and into a material one. Our metaphysical tools are exhausted in the ways of physical delights - an exchange almost ugly when compared to what awaits us, within us, and within each other.
If only I could slip beneath the curtains of language towards the heart of a man so simple, he is profound. His simplicity exudes the colors of love, flourishing and manifesting into butterflies and bougainvilleas, and old women tending to rice farms in China, and laughing communities wearing patterned clothes in Africa.
Here, the breath of compassion has room to manifest, outside of the endlessly distracted and distracting city, in an abode not so incessantly consumed with amassing stamped paper and yanking the eyes of others. . . . .
I just want to be here,
on a small, third-story balcony,
swathed in summer's ivy,
and hear a raspy adhan from a nearby minaret,
As I write about you.
Q: What are you yearning for that perhaps your current ambitions are getting in the way of? What do you wish you could tell yourself?
AND I WANT YOUR CRITIQUES.