Please understand
that emotions
are like airborne
diseases:
one afflicted
with a virus
will not become well again
by spreading it.
A happy person’s
happiness
doesn’t diminish
when shared;
likewise,
a sad person’s
sadness
is not made
any less
sad
by making more miserable
the misery of
others.
A poem I wrote forever ago, but one I’ve always liked a lot.
I didn’t think of you when my eyes went wide
when the buzz began and I was brushing
residue from my stubbly, sleep-deprived face
when the sky was brilliant blue
and the summer air felt fresh on my bare knees
but I thought of you later.
I thought of you as I crashed hard
when the liquor which came for free
returned to take its toll on my weary mind
because you aren’t the rush, the buzz, the high.
You are the dread crash and comedown
when the drugs have run out, much like you did
and you come to fill that vacant void
from somewhere across the wastes of time and space
but you’re a ghost, and these thoughts occupy me
like water poured into an endless pit
left me wanting always more
and never receiving.
I thought of you then.
I’ll concede that this poem is likely
little more than an
exercise in arrogance
but I’d call myself
a fairly smart man
and I’ve been so told for
a long time
and I’ve been told, too
about the great things I’d do and be
because I’m a smart man.
Well, I haven’t seen much of that
in spite of their best standardized predictors
and I guess I must’ve been
a bit of a
disappointment
when I ended up being a little
less smart
than they’d insisted I was
but I have myself discovered one aspect
of intelligence
that nobody ever told me about
so don’t let anyone tell you
that these things come
without cost.
I’ll admit, I might be wrong
but I doubt it—
see, I’ve found that there’s just one guarantee
with intelligence
and that guarantee is that
it’s pretty
fucking
lonely.
It has been long said
that time heals all things
but in my experience,
that isn’t entirely true—
you see, time does heal most things
but some wounds are stubborn
and it takes a while, but even time
sometimes loses patience
and when that happens, it’s over
for what time cannot heal,
it kills.
Of course, the grass is no greener
in the places I’m not
but hopefully, maybe
if I’m lucky
it’ll be a little bit
less brown.
I have an electric can
opener
and it opens cans quickly,
saving some seconds
per can opened—
seconds I would’ve lost
had I opened the can
with a manual
can opener.
I travel by airliner
whenever possible because
five hundred and twenty-five
miles per hour is faster
than walking
but when I can’t fly,
I take interstate
highways because
they’re more efficient than
small roads,
so I save time.
I wait for convenient
spots in
parking lots
to become available,
so I spend less time
walking to and from my car,
and I have more time to spend
waiting for convenient parking
spots to open up.
I wait for the elevator
instead of taking the stairs
so that way I can spend
the time I would’ve
spent taking the stairs
waiting for the elevator
so that way I can save the time
I would’ve spent taking
the stairs.
I don’t know what
I’ll do with all of
this time I’m saving,
but hopefully I won’t have
to spend too much time
doing it.
It’s long been said how
the body is a temple
and maybe, in a metaphorical sense,
there’s truth to that
but the mind is not.
With all of his terrible strength,
Samson would be unable
to collapse the mind into itself
and no amount of fury or hellfire
could level it, either.
The mind isn’t bound by physical restraints;
physical means threaten it
no more than they threaten God himself.
The mind, friends,
is infinite
and it will endure.
If you insist upon loving me
against good advice and
for reasons I won’t pretend to understand
then, before you invest yourself in me,
I feel compelled to elucidate the reasons
for which I gave that advice—
you see, I’m quite crazy
and not in the way that most people call themselves crazy.
No, I’m really nuts,
and because of that, I’ve been known
to routinely make irrational decisions
with flagrant disregard
for whatever consequences might follow.
I’m cripplingly inconsistent
which, I am told
makes for a poor financial investment
and an even poorer emotional one.
Simply put, given past behavior,
I’ll likely continue to make
frequent and terrible mistakes
so understand that, if you choose to love me
I very well might
spurn reason and objective thought
and make some short-sighted, careless decision;
I might well eventually do
something rash and awful,
something that would doubtless leave
an irreparable crack in that mechanism by which
you and I both connect with others
and derive happiness from those connections.
To speak plainly—
if you end up loving me
odds are I’ll do something reckless and damaging
something that cannot be undone
something we’ll both regret
for a long, long time:
I might love you back.
If you’re going to love me,
don’t.
D. B. DEVILLIERS 