gripping fear
night after night
every night at nine
before you
I’d suffer through it
expecting it to come
forgetting to breathe
after you
sleepless nights faded
stress dissolved
and when it returned
you rubbed lavender
all over me
you rubbed lavender
into your hands and
over my chest
you made hot towels
covered my face
steamed the pain away
I bought some lavender oil
thinking of your warm hands
smelling like purple flowers
Categories: Poems
the vampires I speak of
do not savor blood
these minions collect
life
from every person they meet
leeches
slugs
parasites
bugs
roaming the earth in
search of people to
turn into mummies
such bemusement
lying
crying
trying
denying
there’s no way to know for sure
where the next will turn up
but I’ve learned something about vampires
I can show you who they are
by what they do
first, the knowing smile
coupled with a slight distain
or even outright pain,
something’s always wrong
they want you to feel it too
listen to their opening monologue,
in most cases it begins:
“I’ve had the worst day ever!”
will you take the bait?
and so it begins
negativity floods the room:
lampblack
the night sky
some light may enter and still be lost
so vast this expanse
a thoughtful:
“I’m sorry to hear that”
signals a pulsing vein
irresistible sweet succor
attention
adulation
addictive
attention
how do I adore thee?
let me comfort your pettiness.
and by doing, allow you to
SUCK
the very life from my veins!
unless I cut you off before you start
avoid your glances altogether
accept that this is who you are
and hope that one day you’ll be better
© 2010 Eric C Forbes
Categories: Poems
daylight ends so soon
rain retaliates
soaking soil
dousing dirt
a cold, damp, dark time
lights from China
decorate dying trees
balls of mirrored glass
strands of mylar
skirts of synthetic red felt
hide the thumbscrews
gifts in wrapping paper
one for Tommy
one for Jane
one for Mommy
several from Santa Claus
boxes, bags, envelopes, emails
“Thinking of You”
a frantic: ”I wonder who I forgot?”
That’s the Spirit of the Holidays!
making lists in a database
sorting for the best price
drive to the malls and warehouse stores
making sure, making sure
there’s a gift for everyone
nothing’s worse than being present
to breathe in
and breathe out
look back for a moment
sense what happened
4 seasons
12 months
360-some days
reflection. introspection.
distraction of mass consumerism
dark time closes in
time to reflect
silent communion
I can feel the deep pull of the Earth on my brain
slowing and shutting it down
forcing it to notice nature
desperate days and blackout nights
remaining calm in the midst of it
commercialization of the Solstice
over-reaction to fear too far
top trees with tinsel
wrap wreathes with joy
pretend to enjoy the process
sit in silent wonder
remember at last: Breathe.
Categories: Poems
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
– William Ernest Henley (1842 – 1902)
Categories: Poems
Childless and single.
In a world defined by family.
How many, how old?
How long have you two been together?
Just me. No kids. We’re not really dating.
The idea that I’m different occurs to me
in various ways, nearly everyday.
After all, I choose to live my life,
honestly and openly gay,
and face the prospect of living alone.
No guarantee,
that a man will come to spend
his life in partnership with me.
Romantic notions
that filled my head then
and trouble my heart now.
Such notions tease me.
Yet I’m fortunate for I get to choose my own path, alone.
The path of independence.
The path of self-discovery.
A path of composing, creating,
and changing gears whenever I want.
Without the weighty responsibilities.
Such concerns matter to those
with children and spouse.
So I get to live my life differently.
I see how different I am when I visit my family, so far away.
To catch up and share stories.
To spend time with my niece and nephew.
Put my arm around my parents
and my aging grandparents.
Going back in time,
a spontaneous reminiscence,
without my prompting, it simply begins:
How did my grandfather die?
Behind the wheel, medicated and intoxicated
on his way home from a hunting trip.
His car careened out of control
over unpaved roads and ditches,
a clearing of trees,
coming to rest into the back of a tavern.
How ironic to end your life
in the same sort of place that you began it each day!
A social space filled with spirits.
A dark windowless place.
It took away everything from you.
How is it possible that drinking and driving was ever legal?
Or if not exactly legal, tolerated by so many for so long?
How is it possible that alcoholism was a guarded secret?
Friends and family knew but never discussed it?
Allowed to fester and destroy life, definitely.
That was years ago.
Today we have Mothers Against Drunk Driving to thank
for standing up against the powerful intoxicating forces
of Anheuser-Busch, Jack Daniels.
Of the old cartel we call alcohol.
For creating laws to control the use of alcohol while driving,
I commend the ways we’ve tamed the liquid beast.
We’re still blinded by effect
and stranded from the cause:
what motivates people to do what they do?
Some hope that somehow,
one day, this world will come to an end.
That they will rise bodily into Heaven and take their rightful place
at the left or right (I forget) of God the Father,
and really start living their life long after they’re dead.
Does that make any sense?
No, not really. No more than hiding an alcohol addiction and allowing someone to drive knowing that in a matter of time, someone is bound to get hurt, even killed, by the blinding effects of too much alcohol. Clarity is concise. It gets to the point.
It’s better not to bring it up.
There’s no talking sense when he’s like this.
He’s no peach to be around when he’s drunk, let me tell you!
And I’ve tried, lord knows I’ve tried to talk sense into the man, but there’s no use.
He just keeps drinking no matter what I do.
A man wanders daily into a bar and drinks until he falls down, then crawls to his car to play suicide roulette with anyone who happens to be driving on same road at the same time. And no one says a word. It’s just the way it was back then.
I can’t imagine going through life knowing that there was nothing I could do to help someone with such a problem. That within years of moving on with my life, my once beloved ran out of chances and slammed into finality. One life ended abruptly. And another life goes on to be the anchor around which a family gathers and grows. A lonely man with a drinking problem. A grandfather I never really knew. A part of my legacy, pickled and buried forever.
Childless and single. I mingle with my family. I get to know lives filled with spouses and growing children, exhausting careers and spurious trips to local vacation spots and I feel a mixture of things.
Different and unnecessary.
Free and independent.
Lonely and lucky.
Categories: Poems
I’m lucky enough to have grandparents from both sides still alive at my age (43) but have a nagging sense of loss over the fact that of the four grandparents still alive, I can only access two of them. Years ago, a family feud ensued that drew a line in sand between my father’s side of the family and ours, essentially making communication between us impossible. It’s been over 20 years since that disagreement. It’s been a long time.
This morning, I thought about the times I’ve lost with my grandmother Ruth (my Dad’s mother) and how many times I think of her off and on even though we haven’t spoken or seen each other for well over a decade. I find it hard to believe that adults from the same family can behave this way, and yet, as proof-positive, we can. All of us on both sides of the disagreement fence have decided to just let things be as they are. As if that in itself is saying anything! How else could these things be?
We could be closer. We could be honest. We could be more loving. But we are not. The grandparents I idolized throughout my childhood might as well be dead but they’re not dead. Not really. Death is a finality that I cannot change. But something tells me that there’s a way to change this situation. I’ve tried to reach out in the past. I sent a CD of my piano music a few years ago, but I never got a reply. I didn’t expect that I would, but I sent it anyway. I wanted my grandmother to hear what I had been working on lately, since she was the one that promoted my music while I was a boy and was the one I wanted to impress.
This thought of grandma holds me back. It keeps me stuck.
Like an anchor,
holding me still.
the memory of you
lives on in me
with every note
with every chord
with anything Chopin
I think of you
Thinking of you is bitter
and sweet. The loss of you
is unmentionably awful
like a car wreck in the dead of night
in the middle of winter
with icy roads and drunk drivers
racing much too fast
someone is bound to get hurt
and yet… it’s nothing like this.
A quarrel. A series of lies.
A foundation of insecurities
decimated by sudden storms
nothing remaining but memories
of times never spent together
of conversations we never had
of tears we might have shed
in each other’s presence
finding each other as we did
and losing each other as we do
I never got over the loss of you
sitting together at the piano
you watching me read the notes
giving me the courage to play things
I could not possibly play:
Claire de Lune as one example
The same time I tried to (and now) play
that piece, I was learning Bach etudes
and couldn’t possibly learn something
from Debussy — yet I did and I do
How did you know what I could do?
How did your support get me so far?
Was it love?
I’m sure that’s it. I can feel it now as I write this
And yet you’ll never see this, I’m sure
your world is there while mine is here
world’s apart, never to be joined
in harmony or dissoance
with words or without
I try to live without you
and physically this is true, I do
but inside, deep down inside
you’re still there, egging me on.
/ /
There was an idea I had that lead me to this new blog post in the first place:
We wake up and make tea at your place. The sun has just begun to rise above the hills. Your garden faces towards the kitchen window, inviting us to take a closer look. The weather is brisk and cool, fresh and clean. We look into each other’s eyes and say nothing. There is nothing to say. This is the time we spend together: morning tea in the garden. And nothing in words could make sense of how this feels.
We recognize each other as orphans. Your abandonment was physical. Your parents were no where to be found. Mine was psychological. I saw them but never connected. Part of our alliance comes from a common experience. Our world is solitary and determined. We rely on others sparingly, in small doses, in small groups. There is no collection of friends for us. We have each other and our family. That will have to be enough.
Categories: Poems · Uncategorized
when fear comes into love
love doesn’t always prevail
no matter what you’ve heard
or read in books: I’m here to tell you.
love is one thing and fear is quite another
I thought that fear was an absence of love
that with enough love and enough time
fear would dissipate
that love would prevail
but I was wrong
it doesn’t always work out that way
fear gets stronger instead of weaker
fear gets bolder instead of quieter
it gets more established
it sets up boundaries
it speaks its mind and stays that way
I’ve had a lot of time experiencing it
I’ve had a lot of time exploring it
I’ve run from it, acted in spite of it,
and written so many words
in every case, fear is nothing
more or less
than not knowing
it’s an imagined horror leading to pain
that rarely comes to pass
harvesting precious attention
from the here and now
knowing what’s best
it cares for us
it knows us better
it wants us to be happy
reciting its lyrics
singing its song
fear, go fuck yourself!
FUCK OFF, FEAR! You hear me?
Leave me alone. Let me figure out my life without you and let’s see how that goes. I have a feeling that with enough time without you I’ll grow to become the man I’ve always dreamed of: confident, reliable, honest and true. Without you, I’ll be all those things and more. And you’ll fail to be present in my life anymore. You’ll be relegated to the world of memories, pasted into my scrapbook of fears, stored in the attic. Or why not burned right at once while I watch the words on the page burst into transformative flames?
You know, this idea of fear has really got me thinking. Maybe it’s a good thing that you can’t commit to me as your partner, your boyfriend, your man. Maybe this experience of being with you has lots of good aspects. Nothing really went wrong. When someone asks me “what happened to you two?” I’ll have a prepared statement ready for the occasion:
We had a difference of opinion about how we wanted to spend our lives together. What started out as soul-mates, turned into brothers, and became closer still. Then I asked ‘what are we?’ and the same answer came up: ‘not boyfriends.’ That seemed weird, since in my mind and heart, he was my #1 man in all the ways you could measure it and yet he didn’t feel the same way about me. So instead of hoping he would change in another 2 years time, I decided to get some space and find a man who wants to be fully present with me.
Fully present. Where did that come from? It might be the key to who I’m looking for. In order to be interesting to me now (vs. 2 years ago), he will be at least semi-enlightened and able to bitch-slap his fear of commitment and intimacy. His past affairs and relationships will have been just that: past-tense. His current reality will be a summation of his life experiences tempered by his powerful sense of presence in the here-and-now. How do I know this? Because I’m excited as I write this! I’m becoming more present. He will be present too. Fear will be what we used to imbibe before we knew better. Fear will be the stories we used to tell ourselves before we realized they were nothing more than ideas posing as facts. Yes. Indeed. Life is full of uncertainty and yet to fear the unknown is one of many responses one can take.
Live in fear. Worry about the past and what you did and what was done to you. Expect the same kinds of pain to happen again. Hang on to the totems of your life and worship them for the pleasure they gave you back then. Carve your memories into their infallible substance. Let your mind fill in and elaborate the details, providing for a rich multimedia experience inside your head. Let the matters of the day of this moment fall to the shoulder of the road, out of sight, unimportant. Convince yourself that avoiding the little things that present themselves to you each day is the best tack to take.
I’m here. I’m here/now. Time still matters to me. It’s just not everything I think about all of the time. When it tries to dominate, I exhale my stale breath and take another while I hear myself doing it.
I exhale then I inhale deeply while paying attention to that. I can’t do it for more than a few minutes, but I never used to do it at all. With this new practice, I can see fear more clearly and it’s not all that bad.
At no time should fear enter love and win. Yet sometimes, in our case, it did. When one of the lovers moves on though, then what happens? An energetic shift occurs and what happens next is anyone’s guess. I’m anteing up, count me in. I want to see what materializes next! =E
Categories: Poems
Tagged: being present, fear, love
The weather in Marin County California is pretty predictable. A few months of darker days and moisture (sometimes) with 9 months or so of spectacular blue skies tainted at times with wisps of fog or streaky crystalline white clouds. But lately, the weather has begun the Beguine waltzing frantically between moderate temperatures in the 70’s to days of 95 – 100°F temperatures and not the slightest hint of a breeze to cool things off in the shade.
What’s up with that?
Is global warming affecting the later Summer weather here too? Maybe. The cause of the this week’s sudden rise in temperature throughout the Bay Area has to do with an area of high-pressure forming above us which tends to keep things just as they are. No winds to move the air around during the day. Just the heat of the sun baking the earth all around town and sending the mercury rising until nightfall. Even then, it takes a few hours for things to cool down like they should. It’s a high-pressure ridge. And it’s great if you like really hot days sans a breeze. I can deal with the heat as long as I have to. What other choice do I have? I think about how much I love air conditioning on days like these.
Except, I really like the idea of freshly-moving air circulating through my house. As it stands, no one here has central air conditioning since the temperatures are usually at most moderately warm never Palm Springs incandescent. To keep things cool, I close the windows and doors before 10 AM and watch the temperature rise outside while the interior stays much cooler.
Where is this leading? I’m not sure. It’s just been awhile since I wrote a damned thing on my blog, and sometimes when I start writing, neat things come out that I wasn’t expecting. Could it be happening right now?
curious thing about the weather
with supercomputer models debating
the course of the winds and moisture
one still can’t be sure why things
happen as they do
I’d like to think it’s random
but it’s really chaotic
tending to do one thing more often
than something else
but when and for how long?
that’s anyone’s guess
curious thing about the weather
sometimes it just rains without warning
moisture comes from afar and drops itself
in rivulets against the sun-baked soil
unwelcome, unprepared for such a gift
parched clay pushes the water aside
refuses to absorb it even a little
for if it did
it might as well admit
it missed it all along
unexpected rain
showers came with thunder and lightning
an awesome spectacle rarely seen in these parts
droplets of water fell from the sky
moistened the air upon its descent
pebbled the sun-baked soil
like some kind of brutal punishment
an unwelcome change so quick
the water just slipped over the surface
never making it in between the cracks
not yet
not quite yet
in a few months
the kiln-baked clay will be ready
for heaven-sent moisture
darker days
a time to reflect and renew
Categories: Poems
Tagged: poem about rain, weather
It’s late. I didn’t get to bed until 3:30 AM last night. And I drove 200 miles and worked hard today. So I’m too tired to write. Really. Too tired to write. And yet, here I am. Writing.
I missed Mother’s Day last Sunday. It completely caught me by surprise. I thought it was a week away, so I didn’t order flowers or buy a card since I had time. Not really. I had my dates screwed up. And I never did speak with my mother in person when I called a few times that day. I hope she had a nice one.
What should I do about it? Should I obsess, stress-test or process a bit less? I don’t know. I’m really tired. Too tired really to write. And yet. I write.
You’d think someone like me — tired and old — would just hang up his hat and stop this tap-tap-tip-tap crap. But I can’t. It’s late. I’m tired. And I should be getting ready for bed. But something about the glow of my iMac in the kitchen has me rapt. I can’t escape it. Waning self-control. Writing feels better than fighting it: the regret, the pain of knowing I could have written something, anything, if only I’d start.
There. I did it. And now, a little off-the-cuff poetic meter to please the muse:
Standing in line
I spotted the guy a mile away
his face wrinkled and red in the summer sun
the real deal for all to see
with all the watching I was doing
you’d think everyone else would’ve joined in
But it didn’t go that way
I spotted a guy who works hard for the money
his face told me things his lips never would
or was I dreaming? No. There he was. (Right there.)
I witnessed him. No one seemed to notice.
Ruddy. Wrinkled. Sexy-as-fuck.
What was I doing looking so long and hard at a man like that?
Was I expecting reciprocation?
Something to tell my friends?
Not really.
I wanted him to see me.
And when he did look my way,
Time. Stopped. Just-like-that.
I wanted that moment to last forever
and for a few seconds, it did.
He was gone.
I collected my thoughts,
littering the ground
like so many things
once cherished,
now scattered underfoot.
Categories: Poems
Tagged: banter, poem, spontaneous, tired
I’m wound up tight
don’t know what to do
it’s already late
this much is true
I’m wound up tight
the day is through
I’m thinking of sleep
and so should you
Categories: Poems
