letting go

(As an aside, download this video: Joanna Newsom - The Sprout and the Bean. Or see some streams of her playing live: HERE (Peach, Plum, Pear), HERE (Sadie) and HERE (Swansea). Thanks to Drag City and the BBC.)

Apologies for the shitty teen-angst poetry vibe this has, it has been written and changed only slightly just this morning in a sleepy moment of needing to write. This embarrassment should lead to privacy, not broadcast, I guess, though this is a quiet way to let it go.

(It's happening a million times over for a million people around the world, and who knows if you'll play both parts some times...)

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I love her (not just three words)
And there's not a single thing I can say or do for her to love me in return
I've shown my hand
I've said it over. Drained, sadly.

What can I offer? And what can she know?
The intentions are pure, and that sure says a lot
though they're not, not enough
and that never seems right.

To want to give love, to care for, to hold and be held,
to dance and to laugh, to learn and to grow,
to sleep in the arms
and to forgive all our darknesses.

I have nothing more to give her than she knows
I have everything to give her, but that she knows
But this is one side, and it collapses alone.

Why not concede this as fantasy?
Because, as always, with her, it does not feel one
Those deep desires and simple pleasures come in a flow,
having no unrealistic boundary against the normal of the days.

It's a simple desire, every single day
After an unexpected prompt, a sudden longing to share this and something more
and a memory of how it seemed to be;
'Seemed' because that past is tearfully becoming harder to believe in.

In her I see, inexplicably, something special - she inspires
When I'd rather do nothing, alone
I want to bathe in the sun, the life, with her
She animates it all

In me, she sees goodness, sadness,
and has a sympathy.

I want to fight being the victim here, the powerless one.
I want to seize this, show it, make it real
because time questions these feelings, 'How could they be?'
But there they stand, irrefutably.

Her desire and the circumstance - untouchable, unchanging.

To imagine through her eyes:
"A sweet man, for me, does a heartbreaking dance,
but really, where could this come from?
He knows so little of me; is lost in his dreams
and I do love another, and I know that is real."

And how could I deny that.
But dreams or not, it truly is a rare thing
to find someone who makes you believe in them,
wishing this were true, to long to take any small step, together.

And it boils down to this...

Times with her are so effortlessly enjoyable
[she fascinates, she is beautiful in body and heart]
even in silence
and she makes me laugh
while I do her too.

There are still distractions,
there is fun
(and with each, a wish to share)
Though not like the joy in her colours