Longing

LONGING

i.

Returning home

I have no home

Returning to Original Mind

I’ve never been

Longing for embodiment but always a limb

dangling outside the window of a bus barreling

towards an unknown destination.

Your texts picked-up tempo this week.

You made a mistake, you say. Years ago,

you didn’t run away with me.

You didn’t ask.

You’re convinced

I’m the one who represents your freedom.

You miss me. You want me. You long for those

skinny long legs you felt-up on

a Manhattan bench in the dark.

I let you keep longing.

Who am I anyway?

Your filmstrip plays on loop and I keep getting hotter,

younger, fiercer and more challenging to

your present way of life.

I long for her too.

She snaps us into presentness and reads us

poems that feel like we wrote them.

She takes you to Nova Scotia and sets up a life with you.

We roam the fields forever and the tide is a constant rhyme like making love slowly each morning as the sun rises.

You miss her.

You’ve never met her.

You want to hold her and fuck her and eat oranges and say I’m sorry.

ii. 

My father used to call me “Suzanne” from the Leonard Cohen song:

Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river

She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China

And when you want to tell her that you have no love to give her

She gets you on her wavelength and lets the river answer that

You’ve always been her lover…

My mom’s version of me is riding a motorcycle in a Neil Young song:

Somewhere on a desert highway

She rides a Harley Davidson

Her long blond hair flyin’ in the wind…

Colliding with the very air she breathes…

In college, Dustin used to come over drunk and tap-out poems on my typewriter while I was in the other room painting self-portraits.

He called me “Caroline” in his poems and I understood why. I was his Caroline, in my red night-dress and tap shoes, tapping-out my shuffle-ball-change routine on a cardboard square:

Sally-wants-her-change-back

Sally-wants-her-change-back

iii.

In astrology, we all have a Rising Sign. It’s different than your Sun Sign.

Your Rising Sign signifies how others see you.

And so, we are very much that mirage-self, that projection, constantly responding to other’s

responses to us.

Each encounter a new kneading of the clay of the self

until we are left with a small figurine, an idol, a decoy.

Who won the Trojan war?

Nobody knows.

Was the original statue toppled or

was it a copy?

Was Helen even there? Or just the idea of her?

You keep texting me.

Sometimes very tenderly.

So tenderly I fall asleep wanting to believe you, planning a trip to meet you

meeting her. Suzanne by the River.

Where at last we will live out our days touching earth and each other

or just a few days in a fancy hotel fucking and dreaming and overcome by loss.

…first published at OM