Grief – Modern Romanticism

Philosophy – “Why Machines would not Understand Love” – 3/15/2023

“Between the black or the white, there is nothing but everything brought forward from a certain past into an uncertain future.”
Modern Romanticism

What a machine knows is to compute A or B from a scenario, or from a file where something can be accessed in its objective light. What it cannot do is comprehend the middle-ground where nothing can be objective, though resides upon the solid choice of the individual. A machine can bring on disappearances, though that has its role in life and its physical components. Only physical components, for only life can be taken apart, though love cannot; because the disappearance of love would be the disappearance of memories. To those memories, they define love to the connection that had been formed through moments shared with a beating heart.

Should a life die, or when it does, a person is forced to bury what remains of them, whether whole or not in their physical body. A person can bury that. Though, to love? What of love does a person bury, store, or conceal of grief, other than what is felt by them to be the most misunderstood thing to others? To that grief, a person isolates themselves. Upon that grief, love persists, and nothing could erase what a grieving person knows or what they’ve taken away at a disconnecting “goodbye”. A machine couldn’t fathom this, because a machine would see a life as a file, with its disappearance as a file’s deletion. A machine would see black or white, though not the black and the white that relates to what’s in that middle-ground where something cannot be deleted. Though, should a grief-stricken person want for their pain from their grief to disappear, one can believe that should that occur, they’d take the joyous moments away, too. For as love cannot be black or white, it would be black and white, meaning that what’s separated from one will be separated from the other.

In all of love’s pain, itself defines growth, as a metaphysical essence that is only painful because of its existence in a person’s heart. A metaphysical heart, not being the one that physically beats, has been dealt with grief’s dose of pain because of love’s eternal “life”. An existence that does not have physical form does not die. While a machine comprehends parts to make a whole, it would have to comprehend only a life’s deletion. What of love could be deleted, if not ever physical? What of love could be taken apart, when it had always been whole, not ever possible to be split into black or white?

Quote – “The Similarities of Love & Death” – 12/18/2022

“If we can say that love must be deserved, then we ought to also believe that death can be something deserved upon another. Controlling those uncontrollable, inevitable gifts or punishments upon another, for who can believe, with legitimate credibility upon their words, that this gamble of love or death can be ruled as a designated certainty of a specific time? What life knows when it will arrive? To love or death, what life or what person can control a sheer gamble? In believing that neither love nor death are certainties, though ignorant of its time of arrival, we must believe that we are prepared to admit that we can live without fear of decay. Being vulnerable is the essence of all lives that are fearful of coming death or even coming love.”
– Modern Romanticism

Poem – “Nowhere is Good” – 11/29/2022

No need. Most certainly,
no need to hear me clarify
where my suffering should,
most certainly should be rectified.
I weep when I cannot sleep,
letting stars fall from each evening
into cupped hands. I let another day
pass with the petals that form
at the stems within vases,
on the edge of tables
I cannot even reach.

No more. Most definitely,
there is no need to repeat
what will grant me rest in defeat.

Lay me with those uncovered.

Lay me within unsheltered earth.

Let me roam, without moving
not these wilted fingers,
nor these legs, and most importantly
the breath that kept my sails
pushed into oblivion.

For this life, in its flesh
had been a sickened vessel,
piloted only by a wearied mind,
a devil without even his Hell
to keep him warm.

I will not, as I implore you
not to force these eyes open.
Let scenery be dulled
in those valleys that fold
around this beaten, tired body.
Let me not heal
to a fallen life,

for what autumn leaf
has ever reattached itself?

Poem – “His Extinguished Eyes” – 11/29/2022

Once I saw what gleamed, until
I only saw what dreamed. One dark
realization, never before rubbed,
smeared, left under curtains;

there, as a disguise to the daylight
with the misery.
He wanted his chains broken,
his mask torn off,
left with the bandages, his skin,
the nakedness of honesty.

He dreamed under a glaze,
a stir from a heavy heart.
He hoped during the craze
of those jealous of death:

to death’s imminent embrace
of a man with no more
life to taste.

His tongue, a hornet’s nest,
his puddling tears – honey.
Fields this dark and lurking
are finding him wanting.
An empty trail, going backwards
goes nowhere,

not to a mother’s arms,
not to that man’s kin
who weep when he sleeps.

Only when hope draws itself
into winter’s sudden warmth,
can honesty be that next degree
outside of that endless sea.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 22/100 – “If Tears become Steppingstones”

Broken sounds.
Rediscovered signals.
This path is guided
within each of your breaths.

I draw lines,
getting erased
at the last of your heartbeats,
leaving me with a rhythm
I cannot ignore
when it is you
I abhor.

I was close
to a corpse who breathed,
someone who hoarded flesh
upon everyone’s death,
everyone who she
ever wept for
as they bled upon
a naked floor.

Those rhythms, sounds,
broken like ground zero
of a waterfall.
A point in which
all tears eventually
go on, leaving wild animals
to cross quenching waters,
as random droplets
are solidified
into steppingstones.

Rediscovered signals,
because I do not cross.
I give all heart
to the blue
coloring of this painted
river, along an earthen body
of unknown dead,
of recurring dread.

I rediscover
what I do not cover.

I remember,
when I cannot dismember
loose-leaves that are attached
to those branches within spring,
written with histories of autumn.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 18/100 – “Hurting with each Word”

All those thorns
dig deep, like shards
of reflections
in an eternal hourglass.
Someone’s love
was once trapped
in these blissful stains
erupting from a church’s waters,
in windows that were replicas
of former erosions,
of smoothness to palms
pierced with nails for portraits,
pierced with teeth
that leave marks.

Pureness in sickness,
while life weeps in its defeat,
fallen into arms
that keep a child silent.
This love, leaking out from
a heart in its frozen serenity.
I want to fall inside
these bleeding hymns,
writing a will,
leaving an epitaph
floating as a phantom
above a crude stone.

I want to erase
all my unkind words
from anyone’s memory.
If Hell can have me,
if the Devil can want me,
I will embrace his heated eyes
if to keep out all those lies
from watering red gardens
from sinking skies.

All those thorns
cutting kneeling forms,
while love grows in petals,
while hatred quenches its thirst
no longer, in these storms,
holding scarred hands,
sharing unshaped sands.

Philosophy: “Why the Truth Hurts” – Written: 10/17/2022

“A smile is a stone, made for fire. Beneath that hardened mask is a puddle, where our sorrows were held down to be drowned. We held down our tragedies beneath a weight, a stone, our false smiles, though we could not help it when the fires grew to reach others and burn them away. We lied. We told the wrong story. We said to others that we were doing well. They knew better. We did not. They turned away. One day in the future, we will not.”
– Modern Romanticism

The truth hurts. A common saying. But why?

It should be because we understand something about ourselves, though our denial is more willing to defy that comprehension. Our comprehension says that our pain is real. With that vivid realness, we hide it beneath a veil. We do not want to look at it, because its images are too real. We would rather live, showing to ourselves in a mirror, or to others as we connect, a mirage that isn’t who we are.

How does that bode to people who have just met us? They see that mirage, and they see a different person that people, who have always known us, do not see. Have we changed, or are we still the same person? Indeed, we are the same person, because we cannot see what we have buried. An attempt to move on without resolving a traumatic experience, for instance, will result in future connections not seeing what past connections have known. About ourselves. About whom we were, before we sought to hide everything, even those past connections, because it all reminded us of what we do not want to remember.

The truth hurts because we cannot let something that is ourselves go. We cannot let go of something, simply because we have buried it. If a good friend should tell us something about ourselves, then despite its accuracy, are we in the right to say those words were hurtful if they spoke of something we already knew? We are right to make that interpretation, because the only reason that perception of us was hurtful was indeed because we already knew what they know. We understood it, for that’s why it was hurtful. We understood it, and if we are willing to retort against our close friend of their hurtful words, we are now displaying them as a stranger. In doing that, we are hurting our close friend, to say they are ignorant, and that all memories that have developed this bond of friendship are meaningless.

Memories are not meaningless. We are meant to be sure of what we trusted. Though, people with traumatic memories do not want to remember what they cannot believe had happened. In a person saying the words, “I cannot believe that has happened,” they are admitting that they do not want to believe it. In that sense, it is denial being expressed. Though, in the process of grief or of an experience this shocking, from denial to acceptance, a person must walk these stages to find peace for themselves. From successfully doing this, they have placed confidence in what they have experienced, while no longer doubting themselves on what is a truth and a tragedy that can no longer be avoided nor denied. In that same sense, to deny a close friend’s words is no different than denying what everyone else, besides the denier, knows has happened. At the same time, that denier not only denies, though has distorted their thinking to the point of others knowing more of the occurrence than they. No matter the angle, denial is the restriction upon acceptance of something that another person can understand with greater clarity than that denier.

If truth is hurtful, we might deny it for as long as possible, though not forever. If we choose to deny it forever, we lose ourselves in forgetting ourselves out from whatever memories we ever harbored of ourselves. In this, we become something that isn’t ourselves, making it an absolute that other people will know us better than we comprehend ourselves. People are the truths that they make themselves to be. Forgetting how to read our own pages makes us illiterate to them. In being illiterate to our histories, another person will have to read them for us. A person denying their own history will cause them to be incapable of being part of their own future.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 8/100 – “A Breath we both Held”

Funnel those
teardrops, into this open,
discarded mouth.
I still miss
tastes of a sunrise,
blooming without disguise,
as we caressed
stones on a rough road,
stressing for finality
to release a breath
we held, and could not
ever use to turn
our eyes, behind.

Funnel history’s glances
down insanity’s laughing throat.
Pour down all your bitterness,
as I remember it,
as I only remember it.

I realize
that you are past
a mere sunrise.
A beauty whose eyes
have become that sunrise,
and have never set
into an ocean’s depth.
You’ve found your own breath,
and kept me to death’s
simple embrace.

I will wander over
a skeletal bridge,
shouldering all those tracks
I cannot remove,
nor take back.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 7/100 – “Drowned in Ripples”

To color, dynamic. To skin,
aromatic, in what comforts us,
conceals us in reflection,
divides us, in selection
for whom will remain here
closed behind doors, open within
flooded corridors. We are
bandaged, in each other’s arms,
seeing pain, never tamed
in mirroring eyelids.

Passion bites. Nerves excite
all our muscles to move us
once more, on a final twist
to a connecting kiss.

All our veins, like stretching boughs
reaching out like barren fingers
without rings of promise, hung from
a trunk with rings of age.

To autumn, enigmatic. To death,
symptomatic. We are wired,
together, feeding our same soil
with Heaven’s teardrops.
All I loved, revives itself
as an uprising against all that floats
to my reach, all that extends towards
my parched, silent lips.

For a split will occur
to divide me, once more,
in this engrained, tearstained
place of continuous storms.

A mist will cover,
as a sun will forget,
while what’s left
are endless, discolored leaves
as a trail, for a time
of terminal grief.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 6/100 – “Bleed what’s Never Lost”

Recognizable cost.
Territorial loss.
I am even with your thoughts,
holding your trembling hands.

Fabling on dimmest realities,
screaming in closets
for closure’s clarity.

Losing our trail,
on a crippled horse.
Moving backwards,
while weather
keeps getting worse.
I leave bottles open
to count droplets
in unified rush.

One barren journey
to see where we divided
our asymmetrical petals.
Washing our eyes with soil,
flooding a space
beneath our feet
with dried tearstains.

Are we leading our moments
over into recognition?

Forgetfulness. Regretful pools,
where a moon will glow
for another second to a year
continuing to leave tears
as diamonds
for impoverished oceans.

Toss a coin
into a fountain.
Take another flavor
of wealth from these
losing sides. We blanket
our forms, in war.
We have buried
our streams, in roots.
Beginnings with nothing
to hide, except for
what we reveal.

Poetry Collection (Tears and Later Years) – Poem 5/100 – “Taped to the Ground”

I laid you, bare.
I sealed you. To see you,
dressed without dare,
adorned without honor
to these eyes that stare.

All those rooms
to empty you,
with these paintings
to represent you.
You fade in a bedtime
of shadows,
taped to the ground.

Black dress
pinned to a wall.
White corridors
with blurred photographs
capturing your wails.
I trapped you
to refer you, to inter you,
to wait until you hear me
trickle you towards that edge
where a sunrise
cannot be.

What waterfall? What
heartbeat can be
most abrupt? Your loss
of blood, in a bedroom of
silence. Your violent
tosses to see what,
not who, will bring to you
false roses that do not
ever mean to wilt.

Do I wander in your heart,
like all of time’s limping walk?
I felt your pulse,
I changed your clothes,
before I allowed a garden
to grow for both of us.
I felt I had
changed you from
sadness into sunlight.
I swear I had
not kissed lips of rust.

Here, being left
to fill in those gaps
with stains and overlaps.

Here, to sleep
in curtaining silence.
There, continuing to weep
while mourners shoulder you,
winding you back
to those same familiar,
departing tracks.

Do not find me, under rain,
heavy with pain. I will
discover a different bridge,
another river
to embrace another nakedness,
to expose fleshly emptiness.

Poem – “If Spring kept Lasting” – Grief Poetry – 10/5/2022

Walk your hurdles over
to surrender yourself to
the chase. Every inch
that leaves you more amused,
you’ll find what awaits you
in a place that does not
define your space. You have
only succeeded in
reusing old playgrounds.

Step on flowers
if it makes you excited,
if it drives your thrill
past the moon
we both aimed for.

Scorn the sun
that ignites your flesh,
reveals your wounds,
blames you under limelight,
fades you in those nights
everyone finds time
to cry towards a sky
that became its most blue.

Are you sleeping
behind those curtains?
Behind those eyelids
that block all that indicates you,
a flower lingers, stapled
to your finger,
the one that points
in a direction towards winter.

For you cannot
please that directionless heart.
You cannot ever see
your scars, covered in snow,
concealed in empty pages
that will not go
the way this story goes.