A poetry reading off Washington Boulevard. A lot of hub-bub about love. The crowd was buttered up, gleaming, oily, sullied so, with lovetalk, oh, baby, oh. A honey-bunch of olds: silverfoxes, married couplets, people merrily manacled. Cuffed together for god knows how many years? The featured poet and her poems were truly wonderful, vivid, a good flowering–so don’t get me wrong, mixed up on that charge. But the people–the people there and the girl I was with, compounded with the dreaminess–that’s what gutted my goat with a rusty hacksaw. Other people’s love like a sliver you can’t quite tweezer; other people’s love like two bones grinding against each other in their socket. I bared my teeth and I kept the feeling to myself as the featured poet lovingly read her lovely poems of loveliness. It wasn’t all that bad, but, as the poems came and went–one down, two down, three, four–her patrons seemed to become increasingly lovedrunk: dotingly tipsy, smiley, red in the face–their clammy hands smushed, interlocked, melded in “eternal” union. Or so the audience of love swallows whole…

My headspace, cramped. Love: there wasn’t enough room left in me for love. “Love?” I wondered to myself as I sat close to her, listening to the featured poet sing, song, and sing-song. “Love, huh?” I wasn’t there yet, not with this one, no. I couldn’t commit, say such things. Sure, I may’ve been weak in the knees but I wasn’t going to cop to that, was I? Never really do, to tell you the truth. Anyhow, to make this cramped feeling (or unfeeling?) worse, this crowd, these patrons at the poetry reading: they were different. They had space enough for love. They had that feng shui about them. They listened to this woman’s poetry and they smiled and they leaned into their significant other and they loved–they loved so well! Seamlessly, they adored! They were balanced, proportioned. They were very much together: they were devastatingly, tremendously and greedily together. Then I thought–while thinking of my shameful lovelessness –that I’ll be this girl’s laughingstock in no time at all. And, as we all know: there is no sustainable future in laughing stocks. The market for such a foolish commodity–who are we kidding? Sell what you can of your Laughingstock. Take the hit.

After the poetry reading, after that evening, after that weekend, some weeks later: our respective poetry turned upside down upside up. Our marginal love, our slighted feelings, well, they had to be downsized, hadn’t they? I remember her poetry around that time. Or one of her poems, anyway. It was a long poem and it was her best poem. It was something about bears: bears and honey and honey bees and smoking those bees to sleep and there was buzzing and not as much abstraction as you’d expect and her beehives were crystallized hearts and, always, the rational mind interjecting, yet inevitably succumbing to the sweetness of thick unadulterated emotion–the mind giving in to that sugary passion which was reluctantly realized in the honeycombed heart of a marauding bear. I’m mistaking the gist of her poetry on purpose; I’d hate to ruin it my way.

My poetry, my writing: I lost focus. I turned away from the bodily, the concrete, away from the feeling of the body, its curvature, its subtleties, its rhythms; the body was bellowing for my touch in the background noise. My poetry turned phantom. Save the teeth, the mouth–the mouth’s potential for the malicious as well as its yearning desire for what the tongue deems delicious. The mouth was focal: the coffee teeth, the tongue wagging, the duplicitous lips–for me, these just had to be set in my creative foreground. The mouth was all and everything for me: biting, chomping, lipping, kissing, chowing, howling, gnawing, chewing, drooling, licking, teething, screaming–voicing its first-world agony. Things began to sound muffled, muted by sheer distance.

Wounded bad, called it, “A scratch.” I carried on with it, when I should’ve kept off it, when I should’ve favored my leg-up on her. I should’ve consulted a doctor, sought the council of an independent third-party. The Doc would’ve taken one look at my leg and said, “She’s gotta go, son. She’ll take the rest of you down with her. She’s the gangrene and you haven’t a shot in the dark if you stick by that leg like you are.” Would I have listened? Did I want to go on living without my dear leg? And, if I had, would I be happy, happier, worse off? Would I recover, crawl for a while, put up with the pitiful anguish of intensive physical therapy, place an artificial leg in her place, and just, just get on with it? Or should I have let the sickness run its course, let the infection spread, let the disease take me? Should I have welcomed the numb delirium that was to be her? I don’t know. But I chopped her off in the end. In a way, anyway. There’s a lingering regret. From time to time I feel its dull kick. But who knows what’d be what if I decided to do or not do such and such and such and such. I’m all right no matter what the professionals say. My one leg’s all by his lonesome, now. My fever has died down, though. And I’m eating solids again. The “Get-Well-Soon” cards have been a real help, so thanks. It feels as though my choice-antibiotics have just started taking effect, are washing over me. Wishy washing, washing my thoughts clean. Readers, do what I wouldn’t, couldn’t do. And ask your doctors before you take deadendhead seriously.

Till the next entry,

Love safely

— M. J. Matthews

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