A Poem and a Valentines for V-Day

¡Hola! Everybody,
I’ll be gone for most of the day today, and no, I don’t have a date. I’ll be working for the most part.

But that’s Ok… today, I feel good in the skin I’m in. For quite some time now, I have been truly, genuinely happy.

Wow…

When I was doing real bad, I sometimes used to write my poems on ripped pieces of paper grocery bags and sell them. I would burn the edges and sometimes they looked like leaves...

* * *

Nows [No. 22]

Your cover is candor.
You wrap all your secrets in cellophane,
and I follow these false tracks
of honesty with an invented innocence.

I’ve been collecting faulty clues
but I know the rules now.

I must discard your intimacies
and save instead your painful pauses,
those echoing silences that tell me
who you really are
by describing in desperate detail

who you are not.

-- Edward-Yemil Rosario ©

* * *

The Adventure

“We love because it is the only adventure.”
-- Nikki Giovanni

The cliché goes that all’s well in love and war and I will submit that we’re all refugees of love.

I’m not going to try to write something “deep” about Valentine’s Day so that people will send other people here and go “oooooh,” “ahhhhh.” I’m not going to write about romance or attempt to explain that romance won’t fill nagging sense of emptiness. I’m tired, and while most might understand the truth of what I say intellectually, I think too many don’t understand it where it counts most: in their hearts.

The world is full of heartbreak, of people traumatized to the point of psychic fragmentation. I know a woman, whose husband just walked out one day. Never came back. She didn’t have a clue why. He just left. And the deep sadness she feels is almost too much for me to touch. Maybe you know such women.

I know of a man who has never recovered from a betrayal that happened decades ago. To this day, he still seeks out women for the express purpose of punishing them for his hurt. His is a sadness and pain almost too powerful to witness. Perhaps you know of such men.

All around me, I see the walking wounded. Like refugees of love, they walk the barren landscape their hearts broken and even amputated, their psyches fractured almost beyond recognition and it breaks my own heart. I sometimes feel like the kid in the movie, who famously said, “I see dead people.”

Some of these fractured souls walk by me, smiling because they use others as crutches to prop them up. They walk hand-in-hand with the unsuspecting and sometimes they might stay together for decades. Today you might see one or two as our infotainment industry struggles to come to grips of the impermanence of everything.

Please believe me when I tell you that that story of the couple, who have been together for, like, one hundred years, is a lot more nuanced than they let on. Besides, since when has longevity been the only indicator of success? I have yet to meet a long-term couple that hasn’t suffered major -- MAJOR – acts of betrayal and cruelty.

The reality is that much cruelty is enacted in the name of love and we all have the scars to show for it. And yet we continue to love. We love in spite of the evidence and the hurt and the scars and pain. We love even when our hearts have become numb – a sure sign of a heart amputation.

And that’s what I write about today. I love that you can still find it in that broken heart of yours to love again. Yes, I know… you’re scared and sometimes you don’t love fully, or you don’t love at all. I know this. Many of you may not even know what it is to love yourself, but you go on, walking the landscape asking yourself if this next stranger is The One.

Occasionally, crowds of you gather when it’s claimed that The One has been found and you all make a big noise, get drunk and in your hearts, you wonder…

But I see you. I know you hurt and that sometimes you despair. Sometimes I hear your cries of anguish in the middle of the night when you think no one hears.

I know…

I guess this V-Day posting is for all the refugees of love. For those that may eat alone tonight and despair. For the broken and fragmented. For those so hurt that they would hurt others. For those too afraid to love and so they settle for less, content in their safe adventure. I love you because you love, as best as you can, in spite of it all.

You love because it is the only adventure.

May you all find happiness.

Love,

Eddie