Lost in solitude

It’s been 15 years since I wrote a poem, and that’s way too long. Every bit of poetry I wrote, I posted at Open Diary those many years ago. Some of you who read my diary at OD from the beginning may recall that poetry.

Then it all abruptly stopped. In the past week or so, however, the urge to write in verse became once again too strong to resist. I wrote this tonight in a half-hour burst of semi-stream-of-consciousness. It needs polishing, and I’ll probably do some re-writing, but I want to post it tonight while it’s fresh in my mind.

This is the sort of thing you can be self-conscious about and delete, so it may not be here long. Who knows? It might not make much sense to others, but to me it’s all very familiar mental terrain, related to the themes I keep coming back to in my essays. I’m guessing there will be more poetry. The times we are living in call for it.

Lost in solitude

Another day inside.
I could have opened the window
as the first cool winds of Autumn came in ton season-changing
gusts of anticipation
and a bit of happiness breaking through the overcast skies of my mind
in these dark days of unimaginable peril and strangeness and need for others as never before
which in their absence creates a desire
to dive deep into myself
and escape the madness in solitude.

But that same solitude
can suck up my day like a vacuum if I let it, since today I saw no one, talked to no one, felt the nearness of no one.
Nothing, nada, nope.
And then a break in the clouds as I reached out to my friends online and entered that place of my only virtually tangible connection to others.

Afternoon shadows have long fled advancing night,
I lie here in bed instead of downstairs on the big sofa where I live,
listening to peaceful music on my Bluetooth player, starting to notice I’ve hardly eaten today.

Another kind of emptiness, but actually it feels good to seem to not need anything,
but I know that soon enough deep and numbing thoughts and strangely believable dreams
will beckon me toward their maddeningly bizarre and complex Storyvilles in the morning hours when I finally sleep
after letting the full weight of this endless solitude pressure me inward, deeper into the realms of light and dark that are my nocturnal home.

Just beyond loneliness so deep it numbs the mind and brain,
I see my other home in this deep, quiet night where my thoughts can fly unhindered into impossibly close-by worlds I only dream of entering
and yet do actually enter in those abbreviated dreams of parallel universes where I know what I dream is not real, yet it is in some way I cannot fathom or decipher. How I want to know what they mean.

Solitude lets the diminished light of day and consciousness
of what is real and probable and frightening
that I’ve been reading about and feeling
in the nightmare news today, temporarily chase away fear for what we might become if what I hope and pray never happens does.