Detached
They say the poet is three times removed. Once — from life. Twice — from truth. Thrice — from god. I would have to disagree. The poets are the only ones alive. We’re the only ones who can measure honesty beyond objectivity. We’re the only ones who can laugh at lovers who think they can fuck you into the divine, because we’ve stopped believing in god a long time ago. But maybe poets do not belong in this world, because I can’t tiptoe around in circles, dancing in cocktail conversations. How can you wallow in dreary questions like what did you have for dinner? How can you know anyone like that? How can you map someone’s universe like that? When we have entire galaxies in our throats and NASA says it takes 93 years to travel to Pluto? But please, don’t ask what’s the meaning of life, in the way private school boys do; pretending to smoke cigarettes because it’s a metaphor for death while they quote James Joyce’s Ulysses to you. Because your existential crises are no excuse to revere a depressed girl’s writing, for ‘I love you’ and ‘fix me’ are not synonymous. That kind of thinking drowns the anxiety-drenched, as they write your name on each pill they down, as water rushes down the faucet.
When suicide calls, it is asking you to save them, but what can you say from half a world away? When suicide writes, it is asking you to announce to the world who was to blame. Because guilt runs in the family, as we label ourselves into absolute dichotomies: bad father, good mother, bad sister, good brother. I used to believe in absolutes, but that kind of thinking will fuck you over when he tells you “you need to get rid of your feelings for me” and your heart breaks both all at once and slowly; and all you can do is black out in ink over and over saying “I’m okay, it doesn’t bother me, I’m okay.” Maybe writing won’t save you, but it will get you out of the darkest days. Maybe it’s foolish to always veer to the black or the white, but at least I have never manipulated the spectrum of grays, the way almost lovers do. Because of course, when she says she cares about you but she can’t be with you just this minute, it means she loves you, and not that she hoards you, a possessive dragon wrapping her claws around gold. But not all gold that glitters are lost boys, for sometimes accidents happen and when she is holding your hand and saying you know her better than anyone else, for a moment if only for a moment, it feels like maybe it doesn’t matter that you both have boyfriends. But let me ask, when she broke your heart, did she also crack your spine so you would always fall in her direction?
The most direct path to insanity is by thinking at all, and I have been clawing at my mind, as the same thoughts circle over and over, as I make up conversations I will never have with all the people I can never save. My fingernails have scratched away all the letters, spreading them over pen ink and keyboard keys — and the words fall, either like tears or rain I don’t know, but I am in an ocean, and in an ocean, it is easy to forget that everyone else is in a drought, that they’re looking for words that they cannot find, that they don’t know what questions to ask or how to answer in a way that reaches into the milky way inside of their bones and burst out a supernova. So they look to the poets, hoping to a come a little closer to feeling more alive than just existing, pleading to hear someone that rings a truth beyond the bullshit of the real world, and begging to know nirvana in a way that proves finally, that we are beyond shells of what-ifs and almosts, that our fragility does not negate our divinity, and that we are beings worth writing about.