Parallel Outlet: 13

loving you is like walking in the door, warm
the snow soaks into my clothes
turning to water and
rinsing me clean

Even with the curtains shut, and no fireplace to be seen in my bachelor apartment, poem number 61 from ELLEGUYENCE gives me the sensation of looking out onto a crisp snowy landscape, frost on the glass and a fire crackling at my side.

What is the difference between that kind of coziness, and the feeling of love? Hot cocoa and kisses, flannel sheets and hugs. I have been pondering this without finding a factor that I can use to delineate those two sensations. Even though their origins may differ wildly, viscerally they feel so very similar to me, and I don’t mean this to trivialize love. Maybe the opposite.

your pillow is always the softest.

Whether it is the softest pillow I have ever held or the gentlest person I have ever known, these things jumble together to form gratitude. Snowy days are carrying away my wistfulness at another year’s leaves falling, and I’m happy to be sitting inside with my tea, re-reading Elle’s 61, which I think you should read too.

you said you never believed in luck
until you saw my chances
and cast a bet anyway.

~

Image from Pinterest.

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Parallel Outlet: 12

A lavender whistle
petaled into me
like a feather
from an unseen canopy

I am not sure whether the being who speaks in What the World is Trying to Be is human at heart.

This, however, is probably idle speculation in the end. When I read pieces from Rumi and the Shadow, often the central character is as much of an enigma as the space between the lines.

There is a grace to characters and ideas expressed at Rumi and the Shadow which I find soothing. And I am not sure what the world is trying to be, but it is a new idea to daydream about, and to imagine a great tree (or man or treant) thinking about the same thing is somehow comforting.

Then, shaking this strange image
from its limbs
got up and stretched, saying,

“I am what the whole world is trying to be”

and washed its face
in the morning mist

Parallel Outlet: 11

Sleep slower, and maybe you’ll notice curious things. Be wary of using words like “indefinitely” – this comes with a poem:

Baby, I’ll crawl to you

across the vast mirage of time and space

should misfortune befall time itself

or the laws of physics break

It has been nearly a year since I first read the post “sleep slowly”, and the four lines of that poem still come back to me.

Parallel Outlet: 10

Stars peer from behind curtains of daylight

Wishing upon my brief passage

Calloused sole alighting

Softly

Maybe it is the daydreams with which this poem opens. Maybe it is the stars.

Sand and Solitude, from The Memory of Trees, invites me into a world where more varied lights hang in the sky, and where long moments leave room for myriad small things. In the sand I don’t see the beaches or the dunes of Earth today. I’m imagining a less tangible place, where everything is different and yet everything is the same.

It could be the future – it could be the past. It could be nothing more than a fantasy. Where is the sand that you would walk upon?

That slow hour, high noon

Where time passes relative

To the pace of my thoughts

~

Image from artofsaul

Parallel Outlet: 9

“We are almost there,” I say but everyone else around me says “bah” because they do not have the mental capacities of someone who has lived through three centuries and a couple of nightmares.

What will sentient beings look like in 500 years from now? 1000 years? The narrator of The Starlight Gate has me wondering from the very start.

She seems to be somewhere far out in the cosmos and is speeding towards an end that we cannot really understand. She is made of metal and flesh, but in what parts and measures? I wonder about the universe around her and the notes of cynicism that I hear in her voice.

I relate well with introspective characters, and Eric from Walls of the Underground is continually showing or hinting at other worlds through introspective voices. Even in dialogue there persists an air of intimacy.

This results in some tantalizing bits and pieces. If you are in the mood for short stories, take a look at Walls of the Underground.

“Goodbye, I enjoy abandoning you as much as you don’t.”

Parallel Outlet: 8

i do not own the memory of your lips-
for your lips belong to the forest
and the sound of the rain…

We can get very close to belonging to one another – but never can one person completely belong to another.

This is what Geri Geda’s poem, Sena, reminded me of. Lovers may become as close as two people can be, and that is beautiful. Still, if you are like the billions of other people in our world, you cannot read your beloved’s mind and cannot see into the corners of their heart.

Epics, tragedies, and triumphs have resulted from this, and Geri Geda uses imagery from the forest and the sea to give a haunting impression of the divide.

Parallel Outlet: 7

“The low divides we dare not cross,

all that we’ve loved, all that we’ve lost…”

So begins the poem Divides by Eric M. Vogt, a piece that I return to read now and then. In short and seamless lines any manner of things loved and lost are conjured up for the reader, and although it is Valentine’s Day, loss has long been a poetic side to love.

There are surely as many beautiful poems of loss as there are of love, and the stories that compel us almost never contain love alone. Those stories contain uncertainty, regret, transience, and the irrevocable loss itself, where sadness serves as a tribute and brings us to question endings.

What is an ending? Fatigue, alienation, death?

“Love is a many splendoured thing”, and the ending of loves throughout history has been a great mover of men, cities, and countries. Divides brought all this and more to mind. And it ends with a tantalizing reference to memory, the only place where things that have ended may survive.