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its own kind of freedom…

I wrote love notes of various kinds… here and there… hoping I really was seen, feeling against thinking that perhaps finally, my trust was worth giving. I thot: this is what all those story books and fairytales were trying to describe. Swept off my feet, I fell.

Too late I realized I was wrong: when you looked at me, it was not a promise, it was not a meeting of well-mets; it was a warning.

… so many love notes.

Human hearts are fragile, made particularly malleable thanks to the mind-bending heat of misguided belief. Pain births deeper understanding as it sinks into scars you believed to be healed (or, at least, healing). Blame, lies, disrespect, and silence disappears love. We become rank with longing for something that never really was.

This is the struggle to Living.
This is why we pray for blindness.
Loving the Wrong One illuminates if our soul stays open.
I see you even more clearly now but more: I see me.

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on lies, secrets, and silence…

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

— Adrienne Rich —

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roc…

We are come late to the love of birds
for we are come late to love.

Before we had been nothing:
a fossilized egg, a tired metaphor, old as mutton.

Now, the sharp twinge of middle age
and we are caught in love’s punctured balloon.

In banana peel sobriety.
Furred epithet, feathered lash.

We are come late to the mythology of love,
the beefheart stain of the great winged roc

upon the ground of our imaginings,
soft like the centres of some candies.

Soft like the quilted centres of our beds,
our quivering bird organs.

Give us the sweeping shadow,
down from the mountains of Araby.

Give us the claws that catch
us from the desert path, swoop us,

fat white sheep in the meadow,
into that prickled nest, high, up high.

roc

 

 

 

 

 

— Sandra Kasturi —