THE FINAL CONVERSATION

 

TODAY’S POEM: Love among the Shadows. "You and I will travel far together; you and I are growing old together. You and I may never get to heaven, but at least we try..." Words I barely remember from a song I have been singing in the shower these days. They haunt me in sleep, or... even in wakeful tete-a-tete at burger shops.

THE FINAL CONVERSATION

(For Nicky)

Words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them. ---John Locke

1. Questions and Caveats

Are you talking to me? Are you writing to me?
Answers to questions you pitch into the dark
are meanings I assign to the questions you ask.

Always, you and I, will be at opposite ends
of a half-lit hallway where echoes are as urgent
as the tremulous confessions we burden ourselves
with each time we look at our blurred reflections
on the one-way mirrors we look into when hiding
hurts hurled like hunting knives at target trees.

When I call you, I mean to quickly hold you down,
to find your voice, to shape your feelings, to own
your thoughts, to mould you as I want to have you.

I interpret you through my own lenses and mirror
you as you would me and have our confluence
in this reflection, a dragging into a cold dungeon
of thought constructing meaning instead of finding
it, and the “You” becomes the “I” held in bondage.
Except that in this conquest, I lose everything.

Questions and answers become elusive phantoms
of meaning, configurations of troth to the other
turn into fantasy, dreams and desire but delusions.

2.  The Consummation of an Ecstasy

If the dreaded hurts we abandoned on the trail

were memories that needed to be closed like doors
that must not open again; if they were cut up bodies
of ghosts whose bleeding were balm to raw wounds
we sport around as insignias of deathless lovers
guised in the defiant faces of lovelorn clowns
masked in scowls standing in for love and laughter;
if we are finally done, after all these years, with hate
as masquerades of despair and burning need; if we
swear here, now, and onto our dying days and death
that we will scrape open our graves with our fealty
and unquenchable love; then, let us die in this ecstasy.
 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

September 22, 2014, Glen Erin Trail, Mississauga