Pagan Poetry

Tell it like it is

If you want something to play with
Go and find yourself a toy

Lessons not yet learned

Ill-begotten pleasures inevitably lead to bitter endings.

The Road Less Traveled

I need to write more. Sometimes it feels as if my existence is like that metaphorical tree falling alone in the woods, with no witnesses. When you live untethered from society's institutions you must find daily justification for your own existence. And its not easy. But didn't I come here - to this teeming, throbbing city, to the heart of all that is good and evil about this Empire to do just that - to justify my own existence, to burnish the soft blob of my life into something more pointed, more fine, more beautiful? I must maintain this goal; if only I can continue to soldier on through the lonely, ungratifying days - tripped up along the path by people who don't understand me - CAN'T understand me and who want something from me none-the-less. Hungry men who want to use me to justify their own existence because they are lazy; they don't want to feel alone so they want a warm body beside them (never mind that they are not even capable of a meaningful conversation), men who want to use my body to give themselves pleasure and whose next impulse is to then slip away into the night - men who are so terrified of the responsibility to another human being that they'd rather spend their evenings basking in the glow of their television set rather than having to commune with another human being. NO, I do not exist to serve these men and I cannot deny the perverse pleasure it gives me to disdain them, even trick them!

But I must not allow myself to lapse into pettiness. I know what I seek - beyond a reason for my life, beyond an accumulation of disparate and chaotic experiences, I want to find a way in which I can somehow be of service - not for the cheap chores that I'm solicited for daily, but for something more complex, deeper, relevant in a broader way. And I'd like a companion, a fellow traveler - someone who is capable of plumbing the depths, someone curious and intense, someone who desires to know himself, to know me, to know others and who has an interesting vision for the world. Someone who is not afraid, or even if he is - who plunges forward with courage.

The Games We Play

But he objectified me as surely as if I were a pretty little doll plucked from a fancy store window. He’d caught a glimpse of me fairly skipping down my street and he held it in his mind for months slowly turning it over like a piece of candy that one’s tongue probes repeatedly, savoring its sweetness. Of course he’d embellished things too – I wasn't really skipping, I was walking and my black belted coat became a dress in his mind, my hips swaying with assurance. I knew all this because he would recount it numerous times; describing my walk, my look, my attire and never accurately - the picture was always airbrushed for effect. It was as if I was more vivid in his fantasy than in reality. And he was never so amorous and desiring as when I was at distance from him, I’d wake up to ardent text messages describing his impulse to kiss every inch of my body, to lay his lips in my thighs, to taste my skin.

As for my part, I relished the fantastical element of it all. For we were alike in some ways. Two overgrown children heading toward middle age – indulgent and lazy, desiring a life of little responsibility; worshiping the fleeting high of momentary pleasure and likewise deploring the stodginess of propriety. How little we both cared for rules, and the delight we took in our frivolous role playing. We lost ourselves in each other sexually - indulging in each other’s bodies hungrily, hedonistically. We were greedy the way addicts are greedy – we could never get enough, we lived in constant anxiety of the last drop of our ill-earned pleasure drying up and escaping us. I don’t know about him but I can say I hated the prosaic reality of the day – to – day and I scorned any conversation or behavior which hinted at convention rather than what I believed to be a pure expression of intellect or passion. For his part, like most men, he lived in perpetual dread of ‘labeling’ our relationship and of my probing questions when I attempted to discern his feelings for me. Certainly, we were both arrogant and intent upon indulging ourselves. Yet there was true tenderness there, I could feel it in the way he held me and touched me, it emanated out of me accidentally - in the looks I gave him, in the way I kissed him.

Islands in the Stream

Oh how self-indulgent I’ve been, picking at the shabby threads of my life. Unraveling everything I’ve tried to build. Godless, arrogant, angry - I’ve been intent on destroying myself. I cannot live for myself but I refuse to live for another. The world appears random, chaotic and cruel. How others suffer. And all my little luxuries and beauty seem insignificant and pointless. Small futile gestures thrown into a dark encircling gulf. The crushing mechanisms of power and blind certainty inevitably breaking relentlessly over the defenseless of the world. Defenseless through no fault of their own but merely because of the accident of their birth, the bodies and skin they inhabit. I feel powerless to stop the injustice of it, mired in my own myopic desperation and uncertainty. If only I could open my heart to love, to not be afraid, to trust. If there is any meaning it must be in kindness, it must be in abandoning the stale orbit of ourselves - glowing like isolated little suns in a black universe, ignorant of everyone else and the space we share.

Not So Innocent

There comes a time when I must acknowledge my own role in the utter chaos that is my life. I don't always behave in upstanding ways. And since I've moved to New York, I think I've started to become a bit of a player myself. While it seems close to impossible to meet someone I'm truly compatible with - there has been an endless supply of young, attractive men to have fun with. Its become dangerously addictive. Though I was painfully shy and inexperienced with men in high school and my first year or two of college - boy have I made up for it ever since!

I meet guys everywhere now. There's a new one nearly every single week. Usually it goes nowhere - we go out a couple times and I lose interest. Or if I do like them, they start acting like jerks once I reciprocate their interest. On any given day I have several different guys texting me. Most of these men I never sleep with, many of them I never so much as even kiss. Sometimes I can't tell if its them I'm interested in or just their attention. I know this makes me sound like a jerk. Maybe I am - but everyone wants to feel attractive and desirable. And at the end of the day if you don't feel loved; you might be tempted to settle for something at bit more superficial.

Last night I was out with friends dancing and drinking at a bar. I don't even remember how things got started but the next thing I know I'm talking to this guy and he's saying things like "I'm your number one fan!!!" and "I'm really into you." I'm like WTF, you don't even KNOW me! He kept following me around all night. Then I wake up today to text messages from 2 different guys - one from a guy I used to date saying "Good morning beautiful, my angel" and another one from my current 'lover' saying "I want to kiss every inch of your body".

I've become cynical. None of it represents the type of love and connection I'm looking for. But these trifling flirtations, though ultimately unsatisfying, are as deliciously intoxicating as junk food. When I look at things from this perspective, it makes it hard to feel sorry for myself. This merry-go-round makes me dizzy (a sensation I've always loved), and on a good day its ridiculously fun, BUT ultimately I want to get off. The problem is I just don't know how.

Lady Lazarus

"Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air...."

A Terrible Shiny Thing

The dowdy little houses with sandpaper flapping at their shabby seams hardly elicit a flick of emotion in me. I who was once of the country, who knew the shabbiness of rural poverty, the claustrophobia of the dark gathering woods, the small squalid towns with their provincial ways frowning upon any divergence from the most unremarkable mediocrity. The eyes of the locals regarding any newcomer with a dull and unimpassioned hostility. I feel my own transition from this world of fields and streams, of ponds full of silvery fish, ragged marshes and the rustle of leaves in the wind - to an anxious urbanite - a biting, jagged edge barely concealed beneath a bright surface. Impatient, overly hungry with a trace of bitterness revealed in the tight gathers at the corners of my lips. The swell of people in the cities - of every imaginable color, shape, scent and class - each inscrutable face sealing a chamber of alluring secrets. Wild creatures in their natural habitat of concrete and steel, flashing across the edifices of buildings like shining birds fluttering through the trees. The soft dark eyes and damp skin of exotic men beckons on swarming streets and crowded subway cars. Evenings like these - the heavy limpid air, vaguely unclean, presses upon bare shoulders and fawns over my body like a warm, overly close breath. It is here that I make my home now, here that my soul feels itself liberated, that the infinite possibilities of a strange and exciting future unravel in my head. But its here too that my solitary, scant existence among this vociferous bounty weighs upon me, a close companion though out hot, humid summer nights when I toss on my cheap sheets cursing the futility of my existence. There can be no refuge in this world that is not merely a sweet tang of temporary relief amid the trudging onward of our lives.

Figuring it out

This blog is by nature about my relationships - as pathetic, fleeting, heartbreaking, glorious, fun, irresponsible, well-intentioned, sad, sexy, or otherwise, they have been. And sometimes its been a combination of the above! It ain't called LOVE & Mental Illness for nothin'!

I'm not going to write about my career (or lack thereof!), my friends and family (only vaguely and on rare occasions because I want to be respectful), politics, art, my hobbies, or other personal issues. But it IS about dating and sex and love and all those things in between.

Life is not always pretty or practical and I make lots of bad choices, but writing this is like keeping a journal; its cathartic. Writing down my thoughts helps me to clarify them. Why do I do it in a public forum? I'm not sure. Maybe to feel that I'm not alone in all this, maybe because I hope someone else can relate, maybe because I'm delusional and I think for some strange reason a couple people might get a vicarious thrill or derive some amusement from these stories and anecdotes.

Its also about my relationship with New York City, my relationship with myself and my patterns of behavior. I'd like to say that I'm learning a lot and growing wiser and more mature but that's not always true - sometimes I totally fuck up and engage in completely ridiculous behavior. But someday in the distant future I hope I can read over all this and it will make some kind of sense. Until then, the madness ebbs and flows...