Chocolate Disillusionment

The German chocolate cake tempts me.

I crave it at those times of day when I desire distraction from work,
Or when alcohol has eased my inhibitions

The German chocolate cake sits in front of me,
Stacked high and covered with a smooth frosting
I must have it.

As I move to fulfill my want
I realize too late
that it is merely a hostess cupcake.
Even then- its individual packaging appears to be just for me.
The white icing draped on the top of the cake is familiar, and comforting.
I tear off the wrapper, and the crinkle of the plastic nearly excites me.

But before I can even take the first bite I am disillusioned:
I bring the cake towards my mouth but there is no deep chocolate smell,
I can feel no moist cake perfection.

The first bite confirms,
The brown colored bread merely alludes to the dark chocolate I desire
And the white cream is a distraction from what I really want.

I finish it nonetheless.  Unsatisfied,
I reach for the second cupcake and finish that one off too.

Although I am not satiated, I am full.
It is not until the sugar high has worn off that
I sit with the empty wrapper and once again look for the
German chocolate cake.

But it's not there.  It never was.

To those who won’t love

I want to kick you. Hard.  I want you to succumb to the physical pain.  And I want you to use it as a proxy for emotional pain. So imagine that pain, feel it tearing through your body and now make it a million times worse than that.  I want your whole body to be revolting against you. Then imagine the pain as though someone has stabbed you in the chest, not just with a knife but with a pair of scissors, and the weight of a grand piano is sitting on top of those scissors and your chest, and is pushing the scissors open and deeper into you and creating an intolerable pressure and pain that is debilitating. Sometimes all you can do is cry, and sometimes you can’t even cry, you can only sit there and wish that your body would disperse into nothingness. You wish that your body would just fall apart because without your body, the pain you’re feeling wouldn’t exist. So you wish for this, and hope that somehow you will just stop being. Imagine this, because this is what it feels like when someone you love rejects you.

This feeling is a combination of a whole shit ton of other feelings: it’s the realization that you won’t ever get to hold onto that person again, that you won’t ever be able to wake up next to them and feel at ease, and calm, and happy.  It’s knowing that you’ll never be able to share the things you once shared with one another. It’s reminiscing about the memories you created together, and it’s knowing that you will miss them. And then it’s a feeling of shame at the idea of having put yourself so deep into another person’s life and yet you meant nothing to them.  It’s a feeling of shame at the stupidity you exhibited at believing your relationship to mean something more than it was.  It’s the sense of humility at having to tell your friends and family that once again you somehow failed. No, it’s not just that you’ll miss the person; it’s that your individual ego suffers when rejected, or faced with a sense of failure. So it’s this combination, this mixture of overwhelming feelings that causes all of this pain, which at times seems unbearable.

Then, a friend reaches out to you, because they too know this pain.  It might not manifest itself as a pair of scissors and grand piano on the chest for them, but it’s a pain that is a common language to many.  They help make it better, for a while at least. And the weight of the piano no longer feels quite as heavy. Slowly this weight becomes lifted, but then one day it’s all back again, and you’re crying, and sitting, and wishing for nothingness.  Then it eases a bit more and other things in life start to look a little more beautiful and then it’s back.

You might fall into this pattern for a while, but each time you come out of it feeling a little better than before, until the day where you can actually look at someone else and think that there is potential there.  And you’re fine, in fact, you’re better than fine. You are you, and you’re happy because life is about living.  And yeah, it sucks sometimes, but other times it’s amazing, and crazy, and wonderful, and beautiful, and the ecstasy of being happy with the one you are with is just mind boggling giddiness.  It’s always best to feel, to experience, and to live the ups and the downs, because the alternative is to never love and to feel nothing at all. 

Welcome to Suburbia

The streets, they lie.

Their names: Rolling Brook, Mountain Laurel, Pepper Hollow and Longview.

These are only meaningful as labels. Not descriptions.

I can hear no talking stream, smell no poignant flowers, walk in no forested depression or see no far reaching scene.

Instead the plethora of split level, 2 car garage homes is only interrupted by the carefully manicured monoculture lawns and sculpted, stone lined gardens.

The rolling brook is channelized and coddled with galvanized steel, the pavement stifling the talkative nature of the moving water.

Transformed and hybridized flowers bloom too late or too early, defying their ordinary tendencies, escaping their stony habitat

Any contoured relief is filled and tapered, defeating the natural topography and boring my eyes.

The highway bisects the longview, stunts the landscape and aches my ears.

I complain

And yet this is home.

A reminder about the power of water

The river was:

Swollen,

Pushy,

Expecting.

It forced itself across roads, through trees

And made room for itself

            Where-

                        There-

                                    Was-

                                                None.

With its exertion it carried the

Birth of its toils,

Cars, Homes, Dreams, Death

And with a final thrust,

Released them to the ocean.

the object of your affection

It’s not power.

One might believe

Your words of love, praises of beauty and awe of my intellect

Might instill within me a certain

Power over you,

But it’s not power.

Rather your flattery instigates a search within me to

Disprove your words

Because I mistakenly think that your

Admiration implies that

I am perfect.

And I know I’m not perfect.

But I’m selfish, self-conscious, and blinded enough to think that you might believe I am

So for a moment

I think I have power,

Because you are here telling me that you love me.

I don’t think I feel the same and that scares me so

It’s not power

Because you have the ability to make me think twice;

To make me nervous and apprehensive about our interactions,

To make me question my motives,

And make me wonder if I am always using you

Which I might be. 

But it’s not power I have

Instead our relationship

Reveals my insecurities and weaknesses.

If I were honest with you and with myself

I would stop telling you how evil I am

(Thinking I’m doing you a favor by warning you)

I would stop pushing you away and then pulling you back,

I would just leave.

But I can’t, because it’s not power.

my commute in a national park

I moved the mountain today and yesterday and the day before that. 
I move it every day I walk back from work and
It breathes with me.
The others don’t see it, I’ve asked and they can’t see it
But I can
Watch it move forward and back, get larger and smaller
And live. it is alive within me. 
The mountain exists.

adventure is all in the mind

I enter
And take aim to conquer the massive snow bank
The plow has so nicely left to my disposal.

I must cross the winter plain and climb the steep precipice to obtain my goal!
I do.

I take note of the valley road
In front of me
I sit patient, cat-like, and relaxed as the sun’s rays warm my exterior

And then I fall.
Backwards,
Into the cold.

I lie and follow my wandering mind as it remembers
All the ways I used to play
In The Middle.

I’m Up.
Step,
        Through
                Crunch.
Through
Never touching the ground
I make my way to the top of The Hill
My old chair
        Nestled in the arms of a sugar maple
We used to fight about who could sit where.
We broke it-
In a couple different ways and it now seems as unchanged as it was when we last
Sat upon its skinny limbs-


We killed the tree
That was sideways
        It’s likeness to a bouncing chair did it in.
And the four
        Oaks that shared the same trunk
Only Three now
The termites secretly gutted the fourth
It fell, hit the street and by then it had already died.

Jump, fall, roll.

Before the town started mowing:
There was a bramble of wild flowers- pink.
Near the bush that houses the rabbits or woodchucks
(depending on the year).
They eat-
Our garden.

But they reside to the left of the hill which we sled down.
Over the snow bank
Into the street if
We didn’t stop ourselves out of fear.

There is also a path down The Hill and through the woods,
Past the rooms and a holey tree where my brothers used to pee

Down to the house I used to keep
Whose door is now shut and whose stomach is full of

Leaves,

from the tree where I used to collect
My souvenirs from a ride on the tire swing.
Now
There are only the rusted and torn wires-
Evidence of the Great Swing which once lived.

Onto the path that led me in
I take a detour.
Waist high in snow, I pull myself out and slide back into my adult world
Knowing I never really leave The Middle behind.