Thoughts (Grief)
I am filled with grief. I would like to say I had a real reason but I do not. I lost people that I’ve loved. I have lost Leah but other than her no one. She did not die. But it feels like it sometimes. I haven’t seen her in a little over a year. We’ve talked a bit but. I can not find a line to finish that sentence. Not a line. An explanation I guess. We used to spend all of our time together, and now the brief time every couple months we get to talk feels like nothing. I can feel one part of me, embodied by the thought of my girlfriend Terri, saying “This grief should end. You are only hurting yourself and the ones that love you.” And another part responds “Let me just have my grief.”
Let me just have my grief.
I have nothing else except my grief. If I have anything at all it is my grief.
She was from Korea. Every time I see something Korean I have a moment of grief but it is pushed out of my head. “It has been too long already.” Let me just have my grief.
If you had died, then I would have lived alone until I could have died of loss. But you have not died and so neither have I.
I have forgotten. And that is all I have ever done.
I wrote the lines months ago “If you were a glass blower, I would be sand.” Transformed from the heat into something that people put flowers in on their living room tables. “If I were a woodcutter, you would be sand.” But before I wrote Marble instead. But now I know the difference. Because at least you could hold marble without it pouring through your hands.
Already I am trying to turn your emptiness into poetry. Changing the wording to “Just let me have my grief” because the words seem to sound better when I read them back. But poetry is not about wording. It is about truth. Words that come out as they do because without letting them out you would collapse into yourself. Even that is a sullying. If only I could be one thing instead of pieces of many.
If only I could be one thing instead of pieces of many.
The self is a container, but nothing more.
