to be
it feels noteworthy that as i drank a 16 oz cider at the BJs Brewery last night, i thought of something my ex lover wrote to me.
lately i have been feeling as if i do not care that much about being a poet anymore.
that feeling likely started on oct. 7th. like many others, i just haven’t been the same. i want my words to be swords on necks, as Ghassan Kanafani brought up. there is no conversation between them. only action.
even more so lately, watching the devastation upon Lebanon and Iran. my mother asks me why i have chronic stress. how can any of us not? but the poet’s words are a fire to my cold hands. i try to avoid rereading old letters if i can. but it rained today and i felt sentimental. sometimes i desire tenderness especially in moments of ache and heaviness at annihilation and barbarity; her words offer me that, even if the person who wrote them no longer does.
when i broke up with my partner last year, i told myself i would only take lovers from then on. then i gave my voice to the first lover i took. and i wonder if perhaps i am not suited at all to have a lover because i. fall in love. i have always been a romantic.
a friend i follow was talking about the concept of duty in terms of love. i have been thinking about that as well. what is our duty as lovers? as people? what is now my role?
“Can I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!” Barbara Christian said to audre lorde.
the idea that someone being alive makes one feel alive is the thing i hold onto. that my lovers and beloveds, ones i know, known, and do not know, are alive.
and that in absence and death, we may greet the ones no longer here. but worship those we have with us still.
