I actually have a lot to say as there have been a variety of peaks and valleys in the past couple of days. But in the meantime I am featuring here another lousy poem. This one was actually one of the worst, and not just because of my inept use of the English language.

This requires some introduction as a brilliant statement of the inability of an 18-year-old to consider more than 6.7 seconds into the future, as well as some remarkably extreme melodrama.

When I wrote this, I was for some reason suddenly feeling the weight of all the people I had lost to time or death or whatever. I have no idea what I meant in the first chunk there, and I also note that I randomly forgot a lot of people. It is true that rather more than the usual amount of people had come in and out of my life so young, but hey, that's what happens when you move all over the place for a few years.

Many of these people have since reappeared in my life, some more permanently, most fleetingly -- and largely because I realized that I really didn't like a lot of them all that much now.

And, entertainingly -- that J and K at the bottom there? That would be the same J that dumped me on Thanksgiving probably not 3 months from the writing of this masterpiece, and I dumped K even before that because she started pulling all that hand that rocks the cradle crap I think I wrote about somewhere earlier.

And, for the record, my heart's been broken a few times since and I have been more than able to pick up the pieces.

I really ought to have been cryogenically frozen until some sense bored its way through my thick skull.

Loss

I don't talk about it much;
it still hurts too badly,
grieving isn't something coming naturally
to me, perhaps anyone.

this is for b, who I lost to time,
heroin, and New York City, for D,
who followed b into the yellow
dusty world of junk
and dead and deadly writers.

For two grandmothers, who died,
leaving me with only
the terror of my grandfather.

For S, who I loved almost
as much as life, whose breathing
I eased, who got lost in a man, and for D,
who was that man, who I loved as
a brother, a father, someone
to talk to.

For A, who probably
eventually will suicide, as she's spoken about
since we were twelve together,
who breaks my heart even now
when I see her in passing.

For E, the water skeeter,
J, almost my lover, T,
who cried on my shoulder in the gazebo,
And for C, whom I would have loved
a long time, had he not been afraid of me.

For S, who'll go far, and nowhere,
R, short-haired now in Oregon.

This is for my parents,
who broke my heart again
for the last time a month ago,
who made me and kept me alive,
and hurt me so I'd know what pain was.

Even for D and J and E,
L and hundreds of others, Nana,
Nanutz, so many I can't even
think of all their names.

So many heartbreaks,
so many departures, so many
different lives lived:
But this is really for K
and J,
the two that are here now, the two
that I love beyond words, and all I can say
is if my heart breaks again
I don't know if I can pick up the pieces.

More to come,
onehanded