Passersby

I care for her in a way that is unfamiliar to me, as in the past, when it came to how my heart worked, there was selfishness and mostly so. Not completely, yet it was tethered to the actions and the words that came out of my mouth. I care for her in a way that I think speaks volumes of the change that can come about in us as human beings. I want things from her but they’re things that I can go without. They’re things that mortal men ask of mortal women each and every day, things that you can put in your pocket or wear on your wrist or hide when you don’t wish for passersby to see. Things like adoration, affection, respect, intimacy both by means of bodies molding together or minds thinking alike. If you were to pluck me from this spot or that and place me far away from her, my lungs would still take in the air and my legs would still march on eternally towards whatever grave awaits me. I might be distraught and feel as if a damage had been done to both soul and ego and yet the birds I write about would still awaken each morning to thumb through sheets of music, wet their lips and sing. The wolves that I embody in my works would stalk and slash and sink their teeth in rhythm with each other, into flesh and fur and fat and bone. The world itself could not take notice of my plight, nor would it yield in its continuance of motion while the stars watch from their picket fences and broken mailboxes, capsized by comets and flotsam. I would want it to, at first. I’d want to feel some sort of special there, spun up and wound around myself. I might cry myself to sleep, soaked in pink sheets and lilac throws, my legs at different angles but always one out in the open air.

The things I want from her seem so softly and so quickly to do little more than pale in comparison to what I wish for her. I wish for her to catch a break, to find some end to neverending waves that crash and in their turns erode the supple spirit that she stole like spoons from many moons. She’s made of bits and pieces of the ones from Jupiter and Neptune, of Io and Larissa, of Proteus, Callisto. The things I wish for her are things that men like me can’t buy, a mind made up of peace, a heart that beats without the ups and downs of daily life compounding with it’s pendulum of pressure and conditions. The things I wish for her are things that people smarter than myself compose in the early hours of the night. The hours that the owls are out, when deer lay in the grass and chew the blades and sip the dew. The things I wish for her aren’t frail in the hands of Gods and Goddesses. They’re things like painted skies across an afternoon spent walking in a park, the grace of broken stereos that still deliver just enough of that Feel Good for when you need it most. They’re things like orchestrated bugs that cut across the path and seven member families that ride past you, ever cautious of the small yet still existent chance of someone being tossed into their path. The things I wish for her aren’t things that I can recreate or write or form or cook or act out in the fashion of a jester. They’re not things I can conquer with a sword or halberd nor press against her skin like lips or cheeks when I am much too tired to do anything but fall asleep inside her presence.

I care for her in such a way that I can accept the simple fact that I may not be good for her, regardless of the word Want or Need or Beg or Plead. I care for her in such a way that what she says is what will be. Even if it means that what I’ve got is all that I will get.