Ache

What I learn from you
is that this ache inside me,
only ever eases,
if someone else is there.

I know this
because when you aren’t,
it hurts as much as if you never were.

Perhaps, this is all I’ll ever learn, I think,
away from you,
the ache redoubled,
after a long night of the usual trouble.

When we last met,
you noticed I was hurting,
but I did not feel you move
to reassure me,
with your words,
and also through your presence.

It seemed to me you were only there to gawp.

This was the ache tightening its hold.
Now, two days later, it’s got me firmly by the throat
and, surely, I will soon be dead and cold.

This is how it seems to me:
as if I’m in that pram again
being left alone to cry,
the ache passing through my body
into everything out there:
the sunny day that mocks me,
the cloudy day that mirrors my despair,
the gunge in the corner,
the grass I’ve got to cut -
all agony to contemplate
when you’re not there
to help me see,
I’m not omnipotent,
nor need to be.

And maybe this idea is what I am resisting,
and this resistance is the reason why,
(I would not normally
admit this to you,
nor even to myself)
I am irritated by,
and sometimes loathe,
everyone who’s different
and, therefore, out of my control -

which, of course, is how I miss
the unique, the separate individuals
who lie beneath the stereotypes I give them,
creating for myself instead
a nightmare hall of mirrors.

But to relinquish hope of such omnipotence
would add another massive ache:
with what I see out there
I feel I would disintegrate.

Yet, what if, through missing you,
through feeling torn
and twisted inside out,
I finally begin to incarnate,
and, as we do
when we are born,
I cry?

Is that what’s happening now,
when, coming down to earth, with such a bang,
I no longer can deny,
it is my need for this control,
not what it’s there to defend against,
which leads me to disintegrate?

Yet I am torn through with such pain,
that all I want is to be myself again,
free from the prison
of this heavy, grey depression;
while all the time
it throbs into my brain:
such greyness is just being sane,
my ache, in fact a yearning
to be born into my life,
the self I want to hype,
just another dirty,
sticking-plaster stereotype.

~ by bod1952 on August 7, 2008.