As far as you’re concerned,
To sentimentalize your feelings about someone retrospectively,
Your sentiments exactly,
To realize you failed to feel something you should have,
You might have said so yourself,
To feel a realization as a physical sensation,
Aggravation comes in many colors,
To sentimentalize your feelings about someone retrospectively,
Your life depended on something you failed to feel adequately,
What were you doing while your life sped by like, oh, a speeding bullet—
To mutter about a battered book you read at sixteen,
To feel a realization as a physical sensation,
Tell me more about your understanding of our collective humanity
To react retroactively, to forgive everything,
To acquiesce like a dead sponge does,
To know how it feels to be erased by someone who’s mattered
To murder your others on account of your brokenness,
You don’t hear a lot about the families of hermits,
You don’t run into many bands of anchorites.
Run of the mill stories about men, women, and children
Don’t feel sufficient when their occasion is verbatim.
Tell me about the most recent mill you’ve crept up on.
Tell me more about your feelings of our value.
Verbatim is such a physical word. Like a rubber mallet.
Tell me how much you once loved me, that will surely
Solve all of the puzzles. One of the best things about putting
Anything into words—instantaneous acknowledgement
Of the relative good it will do you, to make it appear to be
Static when that is impossible, we should all have to spend at least one
Decade carving what we think we mean into stone,
That might engender a little mindful, severe silence,
Don’t waste your words was often or always tossed at me,
We have degraded our trajectory, we have spiraled into the vortices of despondency,
Such a sad sorry, my beloved also watched me sideways, we were a
Pack of mis-used curs squabbling amongst ourselves in agony.
The one who most looked like a generic human baby in the body
Of a feral puppy, that was the one to be most remembered,
And repulsed by, fear and repulsion are emotional cousins,
Emotions in general do exist to be tangled, it is a wonder
We ever find ourselves out of troubled waters, that is an expression
I will spend all day sorting, and while I’m at it, searching for the famous oil
That often goes with it.
Dara Wier