I was brought to tears today.
3 years ago I had broken up with the right side of my brain. We fought all the time because I felt I’d been betrayed..
Before that we were a passionate couple. I was deeply in love, and every second of my thoughts were rearranged and dedicated to accommodate that space between words. I saw art everywhere and breathed internal rhyme schemes, and punctuation marks were the gasps between orgasms. Music drove me to distraction and I used to end all my evenings on the terrace, Brooklyn so beautiful under the wide expanse of sky, dirty rooftops kneeling between the thighs of my building complex as I exhaled deeply from the 18th floor. Speakers purred with the thick bass of hip hop from my windows, and I daydreamed, constantly. Oh, I was so addicted.
We broke up because I’d become incredibly unhappy - with my life, with myself - and I was so self-absorbed and immersed in my addictions that I blamed words for my inability to speak. I blamed words because they forced me to confront the parts of myself I did not want to see, and our conversations were overheard by too many of my enemies. We lived together under this tension for a while, floor littered with Dutch guts and disdain, condom wrappers and laundry. We went through the motions but all our actions came up empty.
I turned my back to Prose so many times in my sleep that I was not surprised to wake up one morning alone, with half my closets stripped. It had even taken the curtains.
Good riddance, I thought. All this new space gave me time to reconstruct, gave me time to move up in my career and really get it in. I became a straight-A student, I learned how to be more efficient and goal-oriented. I learned to pick up after myself and maintain a clean home. I suppressed almost every impulsive tendency I had and severed every addiction I could: I quit smoking cigarettes, I quit smoking weed, I embarked on a year of celibacy and learned how to really, really enjoy being alone. I quit facebook. I damn near quit the internet. I spent some time getting to understand the art of censorship, the language of the upper classes, and learned how to socialize in more demure settings. I forgot how to make jokes. I recovered. I fought with insecurities. I recovered. But when poetry left, it took with it all the beautiful things that made everyday life luxurious. Life is so much harder without those reminders of beauty.
*
10:41 on a Saturday night, and I’ve been sitting in front of my computer screen for the past 6 hours. It started with a link to a music blog that threw me back into the arms of hip hop… I kept touching and tasting, familiar and brand new, track after track and all these parts of me unlocked… my heart changed octaves and my blood pressure dropped, my eyes scrambled and my words became baffled as these doors crumbled down and like an addict, couldn’t stop-
I began to watch poetry slams. My palms itching and my shoulder blades twitching and of course, I stumbled onto Def’s Poetry Jams; and here my world paused… All thoughts lost, as my mouth parted dumbly, and my hemispheres crossed -
Every word that hit me, only made me weaker. It’s like this careful reconstruction unraveled to destruction and I’m rocking in the corner stuttering like I was tweaking…
the noises came first.
the mm. shit
after a dope fucking verse,
the hand on my chin and the big dopey grin and the
“wooh!” at the end from
holding it in…
youtube was the prelude. I saved to my favorites and played and replayed and chased related links; I had 16 tabs open while all of it soaked in and took in the faces of purpose and pain, and laughter and losses and after the gain not a single wall left inside me remained..
I felt parts of my brain lubricating. Re-virginized paths ambitiously widened, mind was getting hot and, without thinking twice my body began to rock and, I arched
at the shock of delicious being opened by something that I’d so SO long ago forgotten.
Every incredible metaphor brought me closer to my knees.
I kept getting hit -
over, and
over, and
over again
with the power of words - the power of vulnerability. And inexplicably,
I started crying.
All of a sudden I understood the psychology behind religion. I dropped my head to folded hands and I let the love, the purity, the huge power pour in. Today I injected myself with every drug I had left behind, I found music again, and the beauty, and words, WORDS, I kissed Prose open-mouthed and ran my hand through its hair and its tongue coated mine, and we stayed intertwined for a really long time… At that very moment my mind overflowed and I increased my soul’s vocabulary. I held my long-lost love close, and when I overdosed,
I cried.
And it felt so good.
Welcome back. It has been so, so cold without you.
