I’m amazed at how much different things seem in retrospect, as I look back at notes for poems I was never brave enough to post, poems that seemed to encapsule particular moments when a choice could have altered the universe, and reflected intense feelings I was too scared to express at the time (perhaps still am).
A moment of choice such as that one early on when she sent me photographs of her and her friend in her apartment, and the images I concocted in my head of their love -making, as if she had tied me up in a corner to make me watch.
“The heat of it,” I wrote in those old notes, “burning inside of me, the need of it, the in and out of it, in which I cannot take part, feeling that same ache to seek the soft inside where the world closes in around you, but where you can never remain, drawn out again by cosmic forces only to force your way back in, in a never-ending in and out, the intruder making unwelcome (or even welcome) advances, seeking to remain when the real joy is neither to remain in or out but the friction of the in and out, stirred up by the ache to remain, with me, as if bound and gagged, forced to watch as others engage, the in and out of it, the intensity of being helpless to observe it all, but never take part.”
Looking back, it all seems so insane, all those moments when I could have surrendered, letting her do whatever she chose to do, to let her have the control she clearly desired to have, over life and the cosmos, to choose whether or not to inspire or deny, leaving me to strange pleasure of being wrung dry, the dilemma of a voyeur, how it might have been easier to let her pull the strings, to make this arm move or that foot, to force me to bow or kneel – such as the way I felt that night during the opening of the Cuban restaurant, texting me to come and when I did, telling me she meant the texts for her brother, the feeling of being tied and gagged there as well, placed in a corner to watch, a helpless voyeur neither inside or out.
Such poems with such observations were just too painful to post back then, and maybe still are, knowing that to surrender, to give in to someone else’s will, may indeed have been the wisest choice I never made.
Now, all these months later, over a remarkably painful landscape, I realize she was always in control, even when she clearly didn’t think so, and that in the end, it would have been easier to admit it.
Her most recent poems are painful to watch as she struggles to find herself, and how ill appreciated she is in her new circumstances, the puppet master holding strings to puppets who seem to exploit her as if they (we or everybody) think we are in control.
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