I wrote this poem for a variety of reasons, but while it says much of what I intended it to, you should consider it extremely unfinished. I rushed to complete it, and while I edit furiously (internally) as I type and compose my writing endeavour, it requires a lot of reworking as I try to impose a more flowing rhythm, and discover if it makes sense. Like everything I've written, it is certainly meant to be read into and interpreted in hundreds of different ways, but I warn you now that this will be a lot more fun if you don't know me at all, because then you don't have to pretend you know what I'm saying based on what you knew about me. Also, apparently my imagery seems really inaccessible, so interpreting it in any way might be harder than even I originally predicted.

I've become convinced that my writing talents have atrophied from such disuse. I'm really not proud of myself right now, and for the first time I'll actually have to heavily edit something I've written to make it even passably decent. I hope you like it, in any case, but my apologies for a decline in quality from what you're used to expecting from me. It will improve as I force myself to create more, and whine less.

Questions and wishes are all I ever have for you, whispered like hot quick breaths of lust that you inspire with otherwise perfect unintentions. You are my equal opposite, with familiar, silver, everythings, pink hearts, four leaf clovers, and shiny skin. Someone thinks you're perfect, locked away as you are like a treasure for special occasions. My holidays are different; I like to celebrate you with Hallowe'en and the night we met, when we dust off old feelings, instead of having to clean your delicate wings. I don't have a key, but I know of the stained, expensive, antique display case where you've been safely kept, tarnished with neglect and polished for the guests. It rained frogs the day you escaped, and a digression took you to my dark little chair, where I sang sadly to a secret admirer of my shadows, who bravely put a porcelain hand inside mine and told me to stop remembering. We talked and harmonized like crickets throughout our self-imposed night, and when you slept I looked at a different, peaceful face, until keeping you warm woke you up. I kissed girl parts and turned you into a princess. I fell in love with your sparkling reflective tears like a greedy magpie.

You are frequently recaptured; coyly, there is always a trail you leave for others to follow, and it's pleasing to be desired and taken and hidden before your next opportunity to flee. I find myself desperately waiting. The only thing that ever matters are happy endings. I pace to avoid other details, rushing the climax, and that's where you found me, purple and naked, chasing your butterflies. My hugs smell faintly of formaldehyde, filled as they are with trapped memories, carefully preserved in stories about my tired bed and rainy days. We sipped chamomile tea spiced with meaningful gazes, took off our best Sunday funeral clothes, and lapsed into bed.

My love has skin that aches like a beacon, and I can always find it in the dark. My excuse is that you're soft, and tolerantly you suffer my fingers to stroke your shivering back while I smile and sigh and understand. I have no treasure like you. Everything I give you is bought with my need. I sucked love from my mother's breast, as I suckle it from yours now, tasting coral pink and jealousy green. You are a Pretty Blue Fetish. Nothing will be spared to get you back. You fulfill every desire, every need, and every prophecy, and your shelf is gathering dust without you. When you leave, my dishonest half-smile of courage will be betrayed by the way I stare at my feet. You are a Shiny Blue Fetish, which is a need greater than love, louder than sex, and larger than me.

(c)opyright 1998 R.B.F.

If you like, please Let me Know what YOU think.

J a n u a r y 28

Be that as it may, I'm trying to deal with the reality that many people are having a difficult January, and I'm trying my best to help them. Trying to deal with Charlotte's woes is a special concern right now. Her boyfriend, Slash, moved in at the beginning of the month, and that's been going really well for them. This is the first time she's lived with someone, and although her initial excitement and enthusiasm was mixed with trepidation and anxiety, cohabitation has been very positive for her and Slash both. They're happy, and any little idiosyncratic differences in their routines (such as Charlotte's, shall we say, laissez-faire attitudes towards, oh, doing the dishes right after cooking dinner, and Slash's insistence upon it) are, with some cooperation and understanding, being resolved in that good-natured way that comes of people who genuinely love each other.

Still, trouble is a-brewing. At least in the sense that Charlotte is ill at ease with certain issues. It seems that Slash's pursuit of engineering-type educational matters might take him far abroad in September; specifically, Germany. This is raising the question of "what next?" for my two heroes. Charlotte is (to use an over-used buzz word) the 'proactive' sort, and she intensely dislikes being in a position where she lacks control over her destiny, or even her immediate concerns. So, here she is, facing the distinct possibility that in nine months or so, she'll be left isolated, with certain boyfriend-type people being inconveniently thousands of miles away, in a different city, in a different country, and in a different continent. This is bothersome enough, but it's making her itchy and fussy for the reason that it's also making her take a look at her own life, and ask (pretty much, just ask, directed at no one in particular), "Hey! What about me!?"

Charlotte wants to feel important, and in more ways than one. She doesn't like the idea that their future remains pretty much up in the air now. So it's making her think thoughts of distant coasts, and "futures," and having more for herself than she can presently find. Which I understand perfectly. I love my job, and I think Charlotte likes hers well enough (admittedly my adoration for my current employment is probably more obsessive and unhealthy than hers, but that has a lot to do with my general feeling that such opportunities for me are rare and special, whereas Charlotte has held many a government-esque job, and will likely hold many more in the future), but from the perspectives of youthful geniuses in the prime of their wacky little lives, the idea of holding down a job for forty years, performing tasks that anyone could do as well as you do, and that you do for reasons that seem abstract and meaningless, just waiting until the day you retire and let your thirty-year-old lazy ass club kid son move back into your basement -- well, the future looks bleak. She and I both seek more from our lives than mere subsistence, even given the reasonably comfortable level of survival so far provided by our charisma and good office skills. Merry civil servants are we.

Charlotte's life love (if I may embellish the situation with my flowery language) is geography. At least, she's good at it, and enjoys it with her typical zeal and determination, ever since she chanced to discover geography's allure in university. She particularly has a fascination with Geographical Information Systems, and has decided that she ultimately wants to have a lot more experience with GIS. The best school she's aware of is in British Columbia, and her dilemma right now involves the struggle of figuring out what she really wants to do. Her goal is definitely attainable -- if she starts saving money up, she will most certainly be able to afford the relocation expenses (as well as tuition and such), and her training term ends in September; whereupon her future is uncertain. She'll likely be assigned to another fascinating government job, but this isn't necessarily her ideal future. The idea of Slash being so distant, with exciting prospects, adventures, and meanwhile Charlotte being faced with more Ottawa, more nine to five, more of the same old lonely stupid thing -- well, right now she thinks that sucks (granted, that's the essential substance of my life, and I'm hardly happy most of the time).

Due to the fact that I am who I am, I have deep abandonment issues. I could psychoanalyze myself, and dictate my psychologically meaningful life history -- like the fact that my father died when I was five, many of my most meaningful relationships have been long-distance, I went to school in Ottawa when all my best friends went to faraway universities, and I'm inherently lonely and subject to having, and being, the baggage in a relationship -- but I think it can simply be said that I'm clingy, and as such my needs are simple. If people stay near me, I'm happy. If I were in Charlotte's position, and someone I loved were considering such a tremendous transition, I wouldn't cope with it at all as healthily as she has. I'm the sort who would whine about spending every last remaining second together. I'd cling to a pant leg as she walked out of the room, crying and curled up in a sad little lonely ball. I'd get exceptionally sulky and defensive about it. I know; I've had this discussion in the past. Everyone I've ever loved has had some manner of ambition, and ambition has the unfortunate side-effect of taking you away from home most of the time. So I've had to cope with that sort of thing. I admire Charlotte's resolutions. It may be that her need to get away from Ottawa is stronger now because she feels the need to prove herself, but if she does decide this move is what she needs for her life, I know she'll succeed in it.

Of course, I don't exactly want her to go. In fact, to use less passive language, "If I can get together an evil army of robots real fast, I can rape B.C. with robots and explosives so savagely that it falls into the ocean, and then she'll have to stay!" is really what I'm thinking. I've never been able to deal with people leaving me. Even though I appreciated and understood whatever goals and dreams are the motivation (versus them just wanting to get away from that icky old Rob), and I'm coping more and more (the more it happens, the more I get used to it, and anyway, people eventually return... and they find it important to see me when they do, so, you know, I'm a happier boy) with transitions and loneliness as the years pass onwards, I continue to resent being left behind (as Charlotte does... she prefers to do the leaving, and retain control. I lack her motivation, and as such, I take a less active role in my destiny, but we share many views on life). Which isn't the same as resenting the people -- I just miss them. I'd even have to say that I pine. Pine like a small child.

I'm caught between the extremes of trying to help Charlotte, and be her usual refuge from rational thinking and tension -- and in doing so I've absorbed a lot of the grief she's having, and amplifying it with my special cold distilling process into a truly refined state of worry and panic -- and my own worries about her leaving me behind if she chooses to get away from our fine city. This is the balance I'm usually in when I help people. I'm naturally inclined, as I've said, to be helpful, but I'm most helpful when I provide that psychologically uplifting kind of help that you can only really get from trusted and beloved friends... so that I end up getting emotionally involved with the problems I'm helping my best friends with. Even when it doesn't directly involve me.
Clorinda is so far away, and I can't talk about her goings-on, but I'm as affected by her problems as I would be if she were right here -- with the added complication that I find my inability to actually be of any help in a real way utterly defeating and frustrating. It's like being impotent, but in the much worse way of being impotent to do anything -- as opposed to the, relatively speaking, unimportant impotence of the interruptions of proper bloodflow channeling to your erstwhile erect penis (luckily for me I have the eternal libido of youth on my side.... heh heh heh...). Maybe my helps matters, and maybe it doesn't, but the point is, I can only help in a limited and stupid way, that doesn't at all involve slaying enemies or dispatching spiders.

Paradoxically, being so helpful and giving has left me in a most uncharitable mood. Yesterday I was full of an inexplicable desire to be extremely cruel to people at random. Of course, I just swallowed it (like any good whore, I know that sometimes you've just got to let it go down and stay there, even if it is vile), but I was engorged with intense dislike of my fellow man. The Dark Side of the Force was strong in this one. I'm better, but only in a relative sense... I mean, the irritability has been dispelled, but the tension and angst of loving people remain. I'll get better as the people I hold dear to my life attain closure and happiness for themselves. And that really is the important part of it for me... I can't be happy if the people I like best are themselves not.

Someday I very possibly will snap. But, at least I'll be snapping from kindness.

Brought to you by Jolt Cola, with
the buzzing and mild irritation of
caffeine induced paranoia.

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