Here is a poem from two decades ago that still has some resonance for me as I try to pay my debts with love. I’ve posted a bunch more of these old soldiers and am making them march around again (see the link to Poems up near the top of the page). If you’re interested, please go see them so their efforts won’t be in vain. (Thank them for their service, you know, that kind of thing.)
After the Demonstration Nothing makes me as lonely as being told how unified we are. The cell swirls in jubilation and I am expelled into orbit. There is great freedom in wanting different from anyone else. In my life, I have evolved: First I despised the haters. Next I looked down on those who despised them. Now, adrift and rolling away, I have the next person trapped in me, and I despise my righteous isolation, my mirrors, my need to judge. The Pentecostals (whom I now love for their holy separation) cut through the rain seemingly on their own band: He made a change in my life. He made a change in My Life. My wheels keep beat for me, as if pulling me down will make it so. For a moment I slip back to the world and am jarred by the normalness of myself, a man in a jacket. Possibly a complete vessel. If I could prolong that motion--grow from human to artwork--I would long to drop in the world's pocket, wait there to be found and judged, yes, held in the sweet above and below of the human world. But I am away, untethered, again-- Adam. Where a word would have saved me, I veered toward loneliness. It seems this will not be the day my wary heart finds a back door to its categories, lets in the next person, the one for whom no body has been made yet.