Leaning to Live with Solitude as an Old Friend

Leaning to Live with Solitude as an Old Friend

L. Edgar Otto     June 30, 2013

At first for forty days I could not read let alone write
nothing could fill the frozen time, pointless forgotten the left on television shows fallen even from its night light background

The quietness, the empty echoes of many little feet deafening
unlike me I thought I might steal a neighbors puppy for company

A can of salmon in the cupboard, fourth time it came back to me from the food drive, I recognized the serial number. I opened it - what matter if it spoiled or not

This was the end come the millennium, I left after the rapture. My computers crashed, this the start before hand my 911 and in my homeless wander until then, how much more did it matter?

Slowly I recalled my equation in the sand one chilly morning at Yarmouth close where Dickens summered and would write
It did not wash away, something left eternal in our dreams that although no one would see, I did, proud even one human could against time and tides

So I found again my solitude, not defined by others, and tried to unearth the forgotten dreams- so important for creativity I
presented it at a poetry slam mike to a silenced crowd - Oh the thousand poems like therapy were lost, ten year my Katrina- mixed up what I am and what I was in this one heart

Love, damn love, to love again I must still love her then so not to kill love itself...the cold North Sea in winter had no teeming life like the tidewaters of my youth- just time to think and count the pebbles and broken shells, one two many holes the more the rarer so it goes the seas and mountains churning

We each raised on an island in the Cannibal sea of our youth
trying to sort out art our own or about others, perhaps master the source, King James, or Jamaican rum, Shakespeare that we share some pattern of us all as art communicates our own

While all along the island had all it needed to survive the hurricanes and trade winds, triangles of cloth and fish to bind us forgotten we could live off our land

You see, what you are and do matters, the universe cares so one dream that finds ourselves opens dreams for all of us

We learn past the distance where light cannot yet reach us or its message returned that ultimately we were never alone save we did not try to take up our pens first alone in solitude
then together as the tides rise faster than our lifetimes

I could, if more myself and thus more creative, one voice again, one clear vision of our future without illusions sort thru
the old poems, resurrect them line by line in memory longing for the essential past yet not let it take from our wider world anew.

Lost love in its day, the hardest of all things to write about
so successful it so overdone, worth the risk to bring new lovers into this world, blindly and bravely our efforts know reassuring we can find our past again if we risk the undertow
Our Love may remain forgotten, but it was never wasted no matter what we shudder at in the violent silence of its afterglow

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http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/   for the Derek Walcott Love after Love poem prompt,   as all poems on this blog to the imaginary garden with real toads