Love Poem 12

Man, that pain in the foot has been with me

for over 30 years now.

I went maybe a dozen years or so without it

acting up in a

bad way

where now it seems like it is making up for lost time.

I guess that’s how things are with anything like that.

When something sticks around for too long and when things are

going too well, what is there to do

but reject everything?

There is a lot of worry about what people

do

and

say

and

think

and

who they love

and

don’t love

and

care about

and

don’t care about

and and and we can go on all night.

I understand some of it.

Some of it is just how simple we are,

expecting things out of others that maybe we

shouldn’t expect.

For example,

we expect everyone to be a saint until they prove otherwise.

We set everyone up for a fall, even when

we know

we couldn’t fill the shoes we bought for someone else.

Here are a pair of shoes that are too big and too wide and too

long and so full of expectations that nothing no one

ever does

will matter,

and isn’t that a funny position in which to find oneself?

I have a pain in my foot that won’t go away

and it has been with me for over 30 years now.

When I was a kid I hurt it somehow.

I don’t remember how.

My mother doesn’t know how.

I wonder how it happened, because

it changed a lot of my life.

Isn’t that funny?

There is so much through my life where I have

blank space

because I can’t handle experiencing them again

because the memory is an experience and it is too much to go

through.

I don’t ever want to pass on the pain.

I don’t ever want to pass on the years of emptiness.

I just want to be the end of a blank generation.

I want my pain to end with me.