[Newspoetry] The Mournings After

[DL Emerick]

I've seen it all before.  When you know that a friend has something to say, and that it's unpleasant news.  Even a friend will not just blurt out a piece of unpleasant news.

Instead, what you get, for moments, hours, days, and sometimes even an eternity, is speech and writing that hems and haws.  Every saying seems to have something else to say than what it does say, as if there were something missing, something repressed, withdrawn, heldback, hidden.

Information hiding happens as hesitations, pauses, answers that seem slightly off the mark, questions that do not get straight forward, and obvious answers.  Always there is this variation, from the way that such communications once happened -- lightly, spontaneously, happily, freely.

Now, there is this darkness of the hiding, the shadow of the studied response, the incompleteness of knowing what the other is thinking or feeling or doing.

There is, indeed, this aura of consideration, of a calculation that begins to permeate the relationship -- one-sidely at first.  Friends don't worry about the consequences of their entre nous talks, their little chats, their light banters, their quick ripostes.

It is not head-to-head, mind-to-mind -- the fervently desired free speech between friends.  No.  It is the face-to-face, the heart-to-heart, the sharing of soul.

You see it in animals, I think -- how a dog will expose its jugular, show its complete vulnerability in a gesture of submission.  "Yes.  You may hurt me, I offer you a bite in my neck -- but I know that if you are the friend I suspect you to be, you will not bite."

Man adds to that, by his own rituals of the deep throat, by how he speaks to his friend, by what he lets pass, by what he does not fear, does not suspect.

Nonethless, suspicion may rise, like a fog rolling off plowed ground in the wet and warm spring nights.  What happens when that happens, perhaps at last say the cynics, because it is, to their jaded thinking, how all communications would ultimately come to fail?

Oh, just this alienation follows -- this ever returning, ever renewing sense of isolation and loneliness, of ultimate and inevitable difference -- the sense of the deepest grave, the soul separated by its own seven degrees of freedom from itself -- so that it no longer knows itself, no longer loves who it is, no longer wants to be around itself.

The soul retreats, withdraws, flees from all other human contact -- blaming others for their bringing to mind its own individual apartness, ever stuck with itself for its own company -- and finding that this reflection mirrors nothing by way of images that it truly loves.  Only an ego as strong as Narcissus could be thus satisfied and happy -- and even then, it took an Echo to love him, for he could only love an echo of himself.

As for me, or you?  Oh, we are strands in cord, wrapped around one another, twisting, writhing past one another, each maintaining his own grip, by how he holds onto the other, how entwined we are together.  And, when we become unentwined, not by any sharp uncutting, but by merely fraying, unravelling -- we find our loops spiral through empty spaces, our souls undone.

Give us another spin on your spinning wheel, I pray, ye Fates!  Turn us back around each other again and again, love weaves and what is woven tightly never leaves.