A question answered by an older poet

Someone at an Irish bar asked me a few days ago where Marcie's grave was and if I visited. I said, "She visits me!" At her quizzical look, I explained Marcie's cremains were in the house and slowly being spread over the world.

When I see this lass again, which may be far in the future, I will share this poem I found, which itself is Irish:

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there... I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow...
I am the diamond glints on snow...
I am the sunlight on ripened grain...
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you waken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of gentle birds in circling flight...
I am the soft star that shines at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry—
I am not there... I did not die...

Anniversary

You were here.
I smelled your perfume around me.
I felt your warmth beside me.
I heard your voice behind me.
I tasted your lips against me.
I knew your soul as my own.
I saw your face before me.

You were mine.
I woke to you each morning.
I lived for you every day.
I ran to you each evening.
I held you every night.
I cherished every moment.

We were one.
We lived in our communion.
We loved and feared in union.
We walked beside each other.
We shared with one another.
We faced the world together.

We were strong.
Our love seemed never ending.
Our faith was unrelenting.
Our passion was unbridled.
Our bond could not be broken.
Our hearts could conquer all.

I am thankful.
Your loving touch transformed me.
Your gentle ways reformed me.
Your happy manner healed me.
Your patient probes revealed me.
Your lightness helped me soar.

I am here.
I know you are around me.
I know your warmth's beside me.
I know your voice will guide me.
I'll taste your lips against me.
I'll see your face before me.

Into the dreams

She calls me again and I slip into sleep,
run to her and then I fall and I weep.
She lifts me anew and I rise to my feet,
to take in her view, of a life now complete.

She sings in my soul and I dance to her heart,
We embrace, are made whole, though waking apart.
Urging me, no matter how hard it seems,
to be strong and proud, in her light, in my dreams.

Waking up...

There was a quiet in my heart.
I gazed out on the sea.
I was surrounded but apart
as people jostled me.
The din about me hammered on
with life and toil and smoke.
A million people yammered on
though muted as they spoke.
By senses neither lost nor dulled.
My mind was not adrift.
But when the world sighed they lulled
and I felt an eldritch shift.
A hint of you blew past my nose,
A woman with your scent
A happy laugh and flash of rose
appeared, then off she went.
A pair of lovers, fixed, held hands
an island in the flow.
A solid point in the shifting sands
like us, just months ago.
I met his eye and nodded, waved
and smiled as they then bowed.
Then off they went, the moment saved,
before they joined the crowd.
And at the pier a woman stared
out on the choppy sea
Her skirt and blouse were nicely paired
and so like you, to me.
I know I've gone so far away
among the crowd, to roam.
But you were there with me today
my heart your quiet home.

Not being good at waiting

I was never the kind to sit and wait,
I was never one to bide time.
But you were always patient,
and with a touch or a word I was calm.

The worst waiting ever for me
was the same as the worst for you.
I charged and demanded action
and you let me, and it was ours.

It did not matter in the end
no rush was in time, no haste.
When I finally knew the time approached
I watched and learned to wait again.

And I may have been patient,
I may have let you bide your time.
A single touch calmed you,
and a word comforted.

I learned to hate waiting anew
not for the time it took,
but for the time it didn't,
and for the time it should have,
because nothing ever hurt more
than when the waiting was over.

Hard Listening

They listen so they will not feel
the pounding.
I pass them by.
Their ears are sealed.
Every voice they hear is a choice,
and never their own,
and rarely is it one they love.

I listen so I can still hear
the whispers
that pass them by.
My ears are clear.
Every hint of you is so choice,
as you were my own.
and remain the one I yearn for.

An Unshared Road

I remember the paths we chose.
We did not always agree.
Sometimes we wandered.
We were never lost.
I joined your soul in long journeys.
We strolled in citadels of the mind,
and hiked the forest of the heart.
We were never lost.
I faced great obstacles with you.
We climbed mountains of tribulation,
took treacherous trails along chasms.
We were never lost.
I never knew where we were going.
We chose anew at each crossroad
and were each others' only guides.
We were never lost.
I don't recognize this place I am in now.
We never wandered in such ruins
and there is no path in the rubble.
I am so very lost.

The blouse

I remember what you said that night
in a dim-lit coffee house.
Your cigarette cherry glowed red light
and smoke rolled up your blouse

"I hope you'll take it slow with me,
I've been in quite a state.
I'll give it time and then we'll see,
If we still want to date."

You puffed again and I drank a bit
and nodded, acted cool.
The cherry glowed, your face was lit
I stared, a happy fool.

"That's fine with me, I'll take my time,
and learn what makes you tick.
And after all, we're in our prime.
We need not be so quick."

You rolled your eyes and took a drink
as night slipped over day.
You looked at me and paused to think,
I wondered what you'd say.

"But don't dare drag your feet with me,
I have my pick of men.
I've many places I must see,
And some to see again."

I smiled and took your cigarette.
I puffed and blew a ring.
I smiled and said, "On that I'd bet,
the men and everything."

You took it back and pulled a drag,
then turned and put it down.
You took my hand, picked up your bag,
Smiling behind a frown.

"I'm serious you know," you said.
"You may not have a chance."
"So if you want then go ahead,
and show me some romance."

For seven years we wined and dined,
and loved and laughed and fought.
To wed me you were "not inclined."
"Never," or so you thought.

Then after one more coffee cup
that morning in the fall,
You gave your one-time "never" up,
and said we'd change it all.

For seven more we lived a life
as one made out of two,
For me, you were a loving wife,
and I, a mate for you.

I remember what you said that day,
the glow of dusk's last light.
You took your time, as was your way,
and spoke into the night.

"I'm glad you took it slow with me,
I've been in quite a state.
And soon my soul will have to flee,
I'm sorry, it can't wait."

"So many places I did see
and some I saw again.
You didn't drag your feet with me,
said, 'Now,' when I asked, 'When?"

"I'm meant it back then when I said
you may not have a chance.
But I'm so glad you went ahead.
It was such sweet romance."

The night you left I saw your face
inside the coffee house.
Your smile behind a knowing frown,
above your pretty blouse.

The biggest kitty heartache ever (pt 1)

There was little on the Seamus front after his urinary tract infection. Certainly, Marcie had her arguments with him and his wild streak shot out whenever he was allowe outside, fixed or not. But one day, that all changed.

"Mao hooooff!" Seamus coughed.

He was barely able to breathe.

"Mu HOFF!" he coughed again, his head sagging to the floor pitifully as his eyes closed a bit. He coughed hard and his tongue came out.

"Spit it up, Seamus," I said, half expecting a gigantic mouth-turd of fur to issue forth like some ungodly spawn of feline spite and hell. I was happily disappointed at first when one did not.

My relief would be short-lived. Seamus began coughing again later in the day. It was the off-season for my day job, renting and manning inflatables, but I left a note for Marcie as I went off to my job with Pavia-Volpe, a finance company.

"Look out for hairballs. Seamus is coughing," I wrote. "Probably will be huge, so watch your feet"

When I got home, I opened the door to Seamus's coughing and Marcie holding him, rocking him in our couch and holding him close.

"Honey, he hasn't stopped coughin all night," She said. "I don't know what to do."

"Oh, honey, it's just stuck is all," I said.

She nodded and set him gently on the couch. His eyes looked a little glazed, I noted. But he recognized me and let out a rather pathetic "mrrrr."

I spent the night petting him and calming him when he coughed. He coughed all night and through friday. By Saturday morning, we had to take him into the vet. There was one sure sign of a problem.

"Honey, he didn't eat all his food," Marcie said, in tears. "What's wrong with him, why is he so sick?"

"The hairball probably is filling up his stomach," I said, beginning not to believe myself one bit. "But let's take him in, okay?"

He did not fight as we put him in his cage. That was bad. He did not yowl as we went to the vet's. That was worse. When he did not hiss at the vet tech, we feared the worst.

We were told to leave him there, they would call us. When they did, the vet tech asked us to come get him, the doctor was done with him.

We rushed over and waited, holding hands and nervous that they had said so little.

Dr. Mason, our new Normal Heights vet, sat down. "I am not sure how to tell you this, so I will just say it. Seamus has a collapsed lung with a mass on it, according to his X-rays. I think he may have cancer."

We were devastated.

"What can we do?" I asked.

"Well, I am not sure what you can do," she said, looking at us. "But if you want a better look at him and a diagnosis for certain, we can bipsy him or we can get an ultrasound of his lung done.

We nodded, but the doctor shook her head. "You may want to put him down, it's not cheap to get an ultrasound for an animal at all. Chemotherapy for him would be hell, and may not be possible. Once he got his wind today, he started lunging in his cage at us. He would have to be sedated for it, which he is a little old for..."

Marcie squeezed my hand and looked at me, about to fall apart. I tucked her head into my chest softly and kissed her hair as tears flowed, then croaked out, "Please make sure he can't be helped. He is the best friend we have, and we need to be sure."

She nodded. "You'll need to have $600."

I nodded back, then asked, "What is the chance he has something else?"

She shrugged. "It's hard to tell, because his lung is collapsed. If it's asthma, we may get the lung back. If it's cancer, then it's almost all cancerous now."

Marcie was wracked with a sob and curled into me, clutching my shirt. I stroked her back and breathed her hair in, her scent. Dr. Mason mumbled about getting Seamus back to us now and left, uncomfortable. I noted it.

I took him out of his cage and he crawled into my lap and went limp. He was almost damp from stress. I kept him in my lap all the way home.

We slept together on the couch and we fell asleep, exhausted with grief and fear, in the middle of the cold and clutching his soft fur and each others' hands in it.

The all of you

"Smell makes the strongest memory," you said.
You inhaled me and I felt the cool of the air there.
"No, taste leaves the strongest association," I said.
I savored you like a wine and drank kisses.
"You are so striking to me," you said.
You demanded I not shy from your lens.
"Your voice soothes and bewitches me," I said.
I called every day to hear it, be calmed.
"I love how you hold me," you said.
You wiggled against me and I stroked you.
"I love how it feels to touch your skin," I said.
my hands still remember velvet on curves.
The warmth of you squirms on me and pushes
back against me, snug and soft all at once.

Your voice still rings true in my dreams,
It echoes in my heart as I wake.
It never tells me you are gone,
but insists that you love me.
You always look so perfect to me there,
but I can envision no less of you.

I still taste you, your hair and your skin,
your kiss, my palate your pallet still.
You are right. Smell is the strongest.
I remember you in every ward I visit.
But I recall your musk and your perfume even more.
Your visits leave it lingering so briefly, sharply.
Like the taste of you on my lips,
the sight of you in my dreams,
your faintly echoing voice,
and the giving firmness of your hips.

I wish they would linger,
but I am grateful for the ghostly warmth of your touch,
the phantom savor of your kiss,
the echoing hint of your voice,
the beauty of you in my dreams,
And the scent of you that flees when I wake.

The importance of creating

Creativity was the essence of Marcie' uniqueness. Marcie surrounded herself with creativity and engaged in it.

Marcie not only created things of beauty but also appreciated the creations of others. Books, meals, movies and architecture, singers, composers, and artists of all stripes gained her appreciation and patronage.

As Marcie worked towards her English degree, she leaned most of her class selections towards the study of not just literature, but the arts as a whole. She reveled in visits to the various museums, libraries, movie houses, bookstores and music venues San Diego has to offer.

One notes that dwindling numbers of people appreciate, much less engage in, the process of artistic creation. One also notes the tendency people have to push children and teens away from the arts and humanities and into professional degrees. If they are not pushing degrees, it is tradesmanship in place of craft.

The demand that we specialize, homogenize and even self-marginalize eats at the capacity we have to appreciate or even tolerate those who do not. Often, this pressure to pursue practical functionality ends the artistry or the common person. The world wants everyone to fit in a certain niche and function there.

We are called, as we go through life, to focus like a laser on one field of endeavor at a time. That is wrong. People are multifaceted.

The brutal nature of our society's outlook on our fellow human being is an outgrowth of this conformity-thirsty, aesthetics-rejecting mandate. The greed in our economy for orderly and predictable inputs from pliant and contributive laborers demands that all who avail themselves of less hard-nosed pursuits than wealth or advantage, and those that presume to pursue happiness in a manner another can profit from, be somehow "corrected."

At the same time, those who deem themselves and those they will hire worthy of art's rigors tend to preclude the mass. Snobbishness, competitive, money-focused nastiness, an exploitive studio culture and collaboratives that serve more as cliques than schools do not merely drive off the common creators. They also have fallen into the mindset that the paucity of colleagues is due to some special elite status, as opposed to what it is, the slow alienation of creation from appreciation. The same can be said for literature, film and music. This all must end.

Just as we do not always know when an idea will become a usable technology, we do not know when a piece of art will become relevant in a way the mass can appreciate. But if the mass is engaged in the creative process, perhaps that lag time between a permutation of art as a novelty and as an institution will shrink. Perhaps the idea that art is "before its time" should be examined more closely, to assure that saying, "before its time," does not actually mean, "we are not ready for the world to go there."

Sometimes the brutality is that of the cold-hearted allocation of few resources to the creative, the different or the conventionally unemployable. Consider the beauty of someone whose every word is written in a deeply poetic inner voice, silenced for years by society's brutal dismissal of her. How many Peyton Goddards wrestle with their own "ires-epic" today, undetected? Every one is a great loss.

The drive to create must be inspired and supported in every person who ever wished to express themselves, as much for their pleasure as for their profit. Every person who paints needs not be a master. Photographers should display their shots. Actors and performers should find a stage. Those who sang should continue to. But this does not happen. Instead, criticism, pseudo-sympathetic entreaties to "more productive" pursuits and the difficulty of paying the price of creativity winnow the ranks of the artist, the singer, the bard and the chef.

Once a person has been pushed away from the creative well by the pressures of post-industrial and the snotty gauntlet of their discipline's "scenedustry," I have noted that it sours them on the field itself. The artist cannot reject their own participation without rejecting some part of the form they were ousted from. This means that art loses twice when creators cease to pursue their craft.

Marcie constantly prodded and cajoled her creative friends to pursue their gifts and their urges. I will try to as well. I am officially starting a little movement I will promote personally.

I call on all of you who created in the past to stay in touch with that, to revive it if if has faded, to follow it closely if you have let it go and to start creating in the manner you choose. Return to museums and dancing and movie houses. Sing, strum a guitar, draw something, take photos, cook a meal with your own special ideas in it or just tie grass into little woven bracelets.

Even if such a movement were only to increase the number of grass bracelets in the world, to invite any one person back to any creative process successfully is something to be celebrated. All should push for the common creative to be reborn and the neglected talent to be recognized and renewed.

F.

In Defense of Romanticism - Francis the Fool Speaks

So, here it goes. Some people need to back off, some need a little backup.

I talk about, write about, live about and, for a little while longer, at least, breathe about my (our) beautiful Marcie and the love we had and may still, if part of me is to be believed, retain. I know it is not a surprise to some who have known me for a long time that I tend to some outmoded sentiments on love in this modern age. I have tried to place my finger on the issue of why, and I have decided to not, but to face facts.

My "heart's" workings are, simply, anachronistic. More on that later, but suffice to say that, in terms of how I love and how I show it, I am old fashioned. My emotional intelligence may be flawed in that I choose to enjoy and celebrate romance, to reflect on love as and enduring and healing, sustainable force. But I am content to be such a fool if the measure of emotional intelligence is distance from passion and immunity from being consumed. Those who take some comfort in my assertion of potential foolishness should read on.

"What of it?" some of you might ask. "So what?"

Well, my soft-heartedness has, upon occasion, been mistaken for soft-headedness. Let me disabuse those of you harboring that notion throughout this post. For now, I have a few shots to fire off less directly, a poem or two to call on, and a challenge for the readers who are sitting in sympathy, guarded or not, with my point.

I have observed the state of most who claim to have loved and I can, in cooler moments, see the logic of the assertion that love fades. I have also heard the cynical and clinical evaluations and insecure, snotty, pseudo-intellectual appraisals of romance by those whose fields of endeavor, or perhaps breadth of romantic experience, makes it crucial that they deny and decry anything they have been unable to have or maintain themselves.

It is an enjoyable pity that the host's intellect rarely sustains the capacity for such a rigorous-sounding, hard-nosed thesis... but I digress. Suffice it to say such proponents dismay me, but often it is to my comfort, as they are often of little enough impression otherwise.

Some need romantic love to fail for strictly economic reasons. Anything to sell a viagra, a paxil, or an ill-considered marriage license and, later, divorce services, one supposes. Perhaps their support of the idea that we are unable to form passionate bonds over time is a way to dissolve or weaken those we could.

We are bombarded by the seduction of failure and an inflated likelihood of insecurity or inadequacy by our media machine. This is excusable among my pedestrian and lackluster detractors. They are subjects to, not rulers of, their manipulators. Their filters come right off the shelf and over their eyes and hearts.

But I am saddened at times and in other cases. I am most disappointed when I hear from those who, one-time romantics, found themselves betrayed, subjected in some damaging, lasting way to the ugly side of faded love or dimmed fascination.

If I am sufficiently impressed by some one's quality, I dig and find this almost every time I hear these ideas of romantic love's ephemeral state from otherwise warm-hearted people. But sometimes they are an excuse for poor behavior in love and lust, regardless the cause cited.

When I recognize a truly fallen heart, I am devastated. It is an even more acute sense of that sadness to know someone given to romantic sentiment has been stripped bare and chooses to remain there, or to seek the transient luminance and utilitarian company of unsuitable but available mates. There are plenty, regardless one's circumstances, I have noticed of late.

From now on, I think that instead of continuously rebuffing or tolerating, red-eared, assaults on my perceptions, experiences and the relaying of them, I will dispense with the absolutism for the focused. I simply proffer that, much as Gould's rejection of the dichotomy between science and faith, I perceive matters of the "heart" to be "Nonoverlapping Magisteria" with those of the more concrete, scientific mind.

That goes for a more "realistic, straightforward, utilitarian" outlook, too. Lump that in with the clinical and the cynical. You who hide the hurt under a layer of rational justifications and vile blandishments? Pretend to patronize the romantic and smile in some falsely wise way, if it helps. But read on.

I believe, in fact, that the rational and emotional are separate for a number of reasons. But neither can truly overshadow the other in any case I would entertain.

How many times have our evils been tempered, in wrath or dogma, by mercy? Suffice to say not nearly enough by the looks of the world, but sufficiently to have anecdotes of such a sentiment overruling a better selfish course. Thank goodness the emotional mind helps us hide people in our attics when we could simply spare ourselves and perhaps be rewarded for turning them over to authorities.

There are other acts, more attributed to love by even those who decry romance. How many mothers or fathers give their lives to save a child's? Or disacknowledge their own peril to save a stranger's? Altruism is often vilified as a soft-headed nonentity. The savior of a drowning man is working on his own desire to be rescued, the child is saved to continue the genetic legacy of the parent...

Cynics and hard hearted, maladaptive and potentially abusive people dream of ways to depose romantic love just as they do altruism. But this is no cutting-edge notion, the disutility of that sentiment of love. It's at least a couple of decades old. And old Hecht, so angry and vile in his attack on love, went back over a century to mock at least one confederate of mine, poet Matthew Arnold, and his work:

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This was a call to a woman, but in metaphor to all of us, to love romantically in place of faith in gods and certainty, to find certainty in the sentiments we experience as they happen. But in getting there, he deposes religion, the power of the individual to shift the tides and not be washed in them against black shores of a random and chaotic world, and acknowledges drudgery as the existence of most (my own interpretation).

But even this call, to simply enjoy and be caught up in a more romantic place, to shelter and wrap each other in our love for one another, especially romantically, was not to be unmet by cynics and would-be advancers of the theme of futility. Sneering and sad, Hecht arrives with his retort to a long-dead better, incognizant and arrogant, broken and small, but splashy.

The Dover Bitch

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

So here is the undoing of romance, the assertion of the truly vain and vapid in supremacy over the substantial emotion? Yes. Here is the debasement of sentiment and the analog to so much of the anti-romantic vogue of 40 years. Pathetic and pedantic, but celebrated as genius by a generation of people we all know as traitors to every value they once claimed ruled their ways. Hecht wrote this in 1967 to great celebration, I am sure. In response to a poem from the 1850s. Bravo.

I see the extension of the theme of the removal of certainty and the casting down of the quaint. But here, Hecht fails. I have known that great comfort and that certainty in more than one relationship, and I have known women who also held it dear and knew it from me. I have known others who knew it, too. It can fade, but it can be maintained as easily.

Aside from my assertion, that Hecht's passage was against romantic love and degrading to women and to men, that it plied mocking allusions to thematic sexual liberation and limited depth of emotion, and beyond the idea that he seemed to ignore that Arnold visited Dover Beach with his wife, not a random London lover, is that Hecht missed the point.

I pity Hecht. He was too weak, or too consumed by his life of apparent pain and his honorable but amazingly painful experiences during the liberation of Buchenwald, to protect his emotional mind from shriveling and his sarcasm from overtaking him. When the emotional mind is not strengthened, however, it is easy to subscribe to a notion that romanticism is weak itself.

We could be called in Dover Beach to not cling to our positions and risk harming each other when we are actually of like hearts. Arnold's last line, it is often said, alludes to Thucydides' account of the Battle of Epipolae (413 B.C.), a walled fortress near the city of Syracuse on Sicily. The combatants, Athenians and Syracusans, savaged each other in pitch black, unable to clearly distinguish friend from foe.

So I will cease here. Some of you who have been railed against, I do love. But I will also issue a challenge. See if there is any romantic thought, if you are so skeptical of it all, that you can hold to and nurture into something beautiful. And if you can plant that seed in yourself, or remember that notion or feeling at all, then you should try to find it everywhere that matters.

If you cannot, then I concede that, for you, it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all, and a pity you will possibly never know it again. If you have never known it, then I am very much interested in how you came to be loved at all, even for a moment.

And if you have cheered me on, or been wrenched into a heartrending review of your own ideas by me, then I am honored and ask that you simply surrender a little to sentiment or romance. It does not require that you are altruistic, you do not have to be an anachronistic thinker, and you are certainly not a fool in my eyes. But then, I am an admitted fool and accused of sappiness, though I am happier in it than to be ruled by my traumas. My opinion may not count for much.

But then, if you who doubt are so smart and rational, and it is so easy to glide over the dissolution of love when you believe that it is inevitable that the comfort of romantic fire would wink out, then you had little need to have read all of this, and I am sorry for wasting your time.

Much love either way, anachronistic sentiments and all.

F.

I don't like monster/lifted trucks

Last Night, I was run off the road by a pimpled freak in a lifted truck.I was... annoyed. I also chased the truck. However, other bad behavior, someone noted, is wiser left unshared. Therefore, I have edited it out for now.

Suffice to say that when it was all over, I ran on, back north of Adams, back to my route, faster, my anger relieved and the beast caged again, even if my inner savage had reminded me he was there and ready to back me up.

To make sure I channel it properly, I decided to expend my rage in a poem. Here:

Slips

Against you,
who deny that the sky
and the land,
and the sea could be free
to all man,
all reserved undeserved
I now stand
So that I can defy.

Upon you,
who demand that my hand
and my heart,
be enslaved and not crave,
for the start,
of the way you delay
I impart,
That I yearn to upturn.

With you,
who exact and extract
from us all
who propose and impose
without call
and therethrough take undue,
I will brawl,
and preempt in contempt.

You,
who belie you rely
on a ruse
who intend to depend
on abuse
and fall back to attack
on excuse.
won't assuage my red rage.

For I
am not cowed nor endowed
with your fear
disavowed and unbowed
I am clear,
houl aloud and am proud
and I sneer,
no regrets at your threats.

For I
understand that your hand
now grows weak,
you are ill and your will
becomes meek
And the laws are your jaws
and they creak.

Know I, who will stand and defy,
who is clear and will sneer at your fear,
call your ruse, your excuse to abuse,
and will brawl until all then must fall,
am still in civility's grip.
But it slips.




Marcie used to love my madman poetry, anyways. Hope you liked it. Night/Morning, whatever. Rawr.

F.

A Little Note to Marcie

I miss you, but it isn't all the time.

I miss you when there is nothing to distract me.
I miss you after work when I go home alone.
I miss you when I wait for sleep to claim me:
You always come to soothe me
You never seem to worry about the world
You only seem to want to make sure I am fine

I don't miss you when you tell me you're OK now.
I don't miss you when you say I'll be alright.
I miss you when I wake up and I realize:
You cannot make us coffee.
You don't worry that I won't get up for work.
You cannot keep me company when I awake.

I don't miss you when I am busy at my job.
I don't miss you when I am helping out my friends.
I miss you when I check my watch and remember:
You don't need me to call you.
You are not worried that I'm out late.
You'll not be there for me to love you when I'm home.

I don't miss you when I'm running in the canyons.
I don't miss you when I am playing in the surf.
I miss you when I turn to home and face that:
You cannot meet for dinner
You don't want to get out to go see a show
You cannot go with me on little getaways.

I do not know why I force myself to do this.
I do not know why I get up out of bed.
I do not want to wake up when the clock calls:
You cannot wake up with me,
I've forgotten that you're gone until I do
Remembering is another tinge of hurt.

I want to stay asleep and have you hold me.
I want the world to let me have some peace.
I try to reason that I have a purpose:
Finishing another day,
Finding sleep and dreaming of my love for you
Forgetting that another day must dawn.

Marcie's laugh and another poem

A recent email about a particular part of Marcie we all loved (her sweet laugh) triggered a lot of good memories. Thank you, friend. A long time ago, I started writing Marcie a poem that wound its way through the stages of our relationship, including that first laugh. I shared it with her, but I intended it to be ongoing, and I would add to it over tiem

I lost it, unfortunately, but there is some hope. Marcie usually kept everything that I wrote to her, and I printed the poem several times. I found new pictures just this week, and I will find this poem somewhere as well, I suppose. For now, I have rewritten it, and I know at least some of it was true to the first version.

I also have decided to update it, and it will remain a work in progress.

In your thrall

I saw you in the castle square
when Amyrillis bloomed red.
You glanced at me and lingered there,
then finally spoke, and said,
"If you would speak to me then do,
but do not waste my ear.
For I have met many just like you,
and know your tricks, my dear."

I took you in, red hair, blue eyes
round hips and ivory skin
Hands on your hips, defiant guise
I saw your fire within.
"Is it a trick?" I asked you there,
"To gaze upon you thus?
Or do you hide some other care,
mayhap we could discuss?"

You flipped your pixie locks aside,
then harrumphed and walked away.
But a smile was on your lips, I spied,
and I saw a playful sway.
To have you then I set my mind
and sought you out each day
Until the stars were thus aligned
and Venus had her way.

You cast your spell with laughter's voice
I pursued you even more.
You played me well, I had no choice
but with ardor to adore.
I had my princess like a thief,
who sneaks through in the night.
Hid in your wardrobe, your relief
My stealth for your delight.

You christened me your cavalier.
and charged me when you toured,
to wait, be firm, to persevere.
You left, I stayed, endured.
You filled my ears with tales of lands,
of places you had been.
I only cared to fill my hands
with your fiery locks again.

When finally I heard the call
to journey north, to learn,
you went there first to found our hall,
and bring the hearth to burn.
Among the giants, in the cold,
you kept me warm but sighed.
Two winters passed and not a day,
not one more could you last.

So south again, where friend and kin
now awaited our return.
And autumn's eve, among the din,
I thought that I could discern
a sadness in my fairy love,
a frown upon your face.
I knew then what you fretted of,
embarrassment, disgrace.

You called me to the parapets
where sullied pennants waved.
You asked me as you waved your arm,
"Is it me who has been saved?
Am I to wait for you, my knight,
until I am too aged?
For you to marry me, despite
our seven years engaged?"

I pulled you close and as you cried,
gently reminded you
That I was he you once denied,
the chance to marry you.
"But if you now believe me worth
a year, a life, an age,
then I will bend my knee to earth
and end this long engage."

We flew, without our friends and kin,
to initiate new life
We swore ourselves and once again
I'd won, this time a wife
"I will not fail to honor you,
nor fail to hold your faith."
"And I will not abandon you,
to wander as you wait."

To family and firmament
we made our union known.
No challenge to our testament
our lives now shared, our own.
We went to battle, and to fair
unbeatable and strong.
My fiery heart, your fiery hair,
and nothing could go wrong.

Until one day as I averred
the wrongs of one corrupted,
your cries rang out and I deferred
my probing interrupted.
You said it was the mark of death,
but I could not believe.
For it was you, to every breath
my soul, my heart, did cleave.

So off again, this time to war,
you were scarred and then rebuilt.
When you flowered in hope once more,
your bloom began to wilt.
I carried you, watched over you
my life, my love, my queen.
And treasured every breath of you,
each day, each night, each scene.

I was your cavalier, my love,
I was your questing knight
but now I quest for remnants of
your red-haired, fairy light.
And though the ashes of our life
rain down around my head
I will not quit my geas, sweet wife
even if I am dead.

And Now I Wait

So the ceremony was wonderful, if tearful for me. Everyone was very understanding and let me stumble, choked up, over my thoughts and feelings. I closed it with a poem I wrote Marcie. I hope you all enjoy it. Personal or not, it is to be shared.

And Now I Wait

Sweet Marcie, know you why
Death came that night to choose you?
You were too young to die,
It was too soon to lose you.

Was there too much for us,
So heaven chose to take you?
A life so splendorous,
Did jealous fate forsake you?

So many things to do,
Such dreams we did endeavor.
And mine so built on you,
As love and wife forever.

Our pain of months and years
Overshadowed late that night.
When worst of all my fears,
You slipped beyond my sight.

It matters little dear,
I’m left without you, mourning.
To wander loveless here,
From shared voyage to sojourning.

I’ll never know your touch,
Never hear your voice again.
But what I’ll miss so much,
Is the warmth of you within.

Death was so hard on you,
You fought with all your mettle.
Then, sapped and harrowed through,
I watched your body settle.

You still live in my dreams,
I’ve seen you in your splendor.
Then I wake again, it seems,
And bitterly surrender.

A glaring sun’s new day
Will call for me, I reckon.
'Til then, I hope and pray
At night to hear you beckon.

There was more. If I decide to share those, I will mark them "Poetry:" in the title. Have a good night, folks. I am going over to take care of Marcie's mom.

F.