POEM: OR

OR

Or when you asked: “When is there time for another time?”

What did you mean?

Was it just the business of being busy

with those everyday tangents

that make us miss each other

like electrons spinning around some impossibly dense atom

with the Great Force of the Universe

keeping us apart?

Was that all?

Or when you said: “It’s not the right time now.”

Was it that Great Wonky Collection of stars

centered around the vicinity of You

that pulled me in like some fucking black hole,

and sucked away all the light like a flashlight turned inward

that finally spoke?

Or when you communicated: “I don’t have time for this.”

Did the dash-dot world fast-forwarded

to screens of edited electronic text

finally fit you so that you could blog about in style

like some caped robber baron

or a duke among the ashes?

Or when I was told, at last, that there was no time left,

did the sour rind of lemon and tequila,

and the salt-taste of your skin

fall like gravity to the center of the earth,

and boil away in the pressure of lost moments?

Or did imp-faced Time grin like a cherub

and spit milk down my throat

to ease my hunger?

ANOTHER EARLY POEM, AND I GUESS IT FOCUSES ON how relationships change over time, with all the miscommunications, the things said or not said, the sum of all the things said; all the time-wasting activities we create around things in life that have no real significance when compared with establishing truly meaningful relationships with others. The speaker is looking back, seeing waste, and has a profound regret for not taking the opportunities for love when they were there.

I do like, in particular, the last stanza with its imagery of sex and love; how they are lost to the speaker and left to the arbitrary whims of that infernal imp, Eros. His arrows can make our skin burn with pain, as well as the most exquisite pleasure. I conflate Eros (or Cupid, if you’d rather) with Time; I may have been thinking about ‘times arrows’ or “the arrows of fortune” and how they wound. (Time, after all, isn't usually depicted as a "cherub" or an "imp", as love is, for example, in Greek mythology.)

I read a short story (can’t remember anything about it other than the premise that the main character, who wanted desperately to be a successful screen writer in Hollywood, gradually began to notice that his life seemed to be going by quicker and quicker, with ‘gaps’ between one part and another. He suddenly found himself, for example, in a new home that his successful screenplay had got for him, but he couldn’t recall the details of writing it or the events following. More and more of his life took on this ‘episodic’ flow as he matured and aged, causing him to be fearful of its unnatural rapidity, and he was puzzled why his life felt more and more like a movie, something he seemed to observe but not live. Eventually, on his deathbed he looks up to see words floating in the air—like you see on a movie screen—only from behind, as if he were inside the movie of his life.

     I guess my thoughts are that without love in your life, you live a kind of episodic existence—one event following another, without anything to connect them or bind them into a coherent narrative. Without love, life can be a series of meaningless events, ending in an anti-climax of empty days… Thus our fortunes play out over time from our first breaths to our last. 

In the end, is what the immortal imp gives the speaker enough to sustain him? Does the speaker even wish to be sustained? Will his memories of lost love eventually fade, or will they live on in the hope that fortune may someday favour him, again? 

Cheers, Jake.