Late Summer Flies

Late summer flies

too many goodbyes
leave me hard up
and breathless yet breathing.
I'm cleaning.

There're spots on the walls
not enough calls
and an absence,
a longing,
retreating.

Maybe I'll start
making rhymes with no heart
that are empty
and don't stop
repeating.

Maybe I'll call
this beginning of fall
and rolled up in a ball,
I'll keep bleating and slowly
receding.

I don't usually start a post with a poem, but today I wanted to. Because I wrote it yesterday while I was cleaning my kitchen and it expresses my current frustration better than any witty introduction might.

So I know there are cycles in life, and that this is the end and the beginning of one for me, and that I just have let things go and flow and wait for the new, but this is hard to do when all I want to say is: this cycle sucks.

And don't you dare ask me about my dissertation.

And modesty is overrated. I've been thinking about confidence, and how I need it, in order to do the things I want to do, to have the things I need, and how I just don't have it now, which is probably why I can't get any work done. This cycle sucks.

I actually feel like I can't do anything, and this poetry blog becomes just another rant, which is not what I want it to be. I have been writing a lot of poems, what with all the feelings I've been feeling and letting flow, or rather leak, so that is one thing. But I'm not sure these kinds of poems, these, my-chest-is-about-to-burst-and-snot-is-everywhere poems, these "I can't stand it anymore and words are no good but I've got to get something out and down or else I'll drown" poems are the best kind.

Here is something a friend posted the other day on our favorite social network website:

"We talk much too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future - all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." Goethe

So maybe my poems are like sketches and that is a step in the right direction, but decidedly, I wish I was more like "organic Nature". I wish I talked less, that there was less noise around me, inside me. So, I'm working on peace of mind and simplicity and silencing my head. Ah, yes, that is what I can focus on, instead of the numerous rants of my multiple personalities. I wish I were always in touch the world's "momentous signatures". For now, I feel trapped and obsessed with these small things, these late summer flies.

I do want to say I am very grateful for friends. I know I am not alone as I go around and drone, towards the eventual end of this cycle that sucks.