The Word

Or perhaps it's not so much that I have nothing to say but that I'm not quite sure how to say it, it being whatever it is that is waiting to be born. Is it the Voice that's missing again? Is my block a question of form rather than content? Or is it simple distraction? I admit, there is a 'she' again, a Siren circling my thoughts, calling them away and corralling them in a distant and inaccessible crevice of mind. Devouring my words.

Love is a capricious beast. It can soothe and inspire, it can caress like fairy wings and then suddenly it can turn on you. Like a domesticated panther rediscovering its feral roots, it can ravage you and hurl your shattered remains down the deepest abyss.

I'm in love. Great. Dangerous.

Is it love then? The Great Diversion? No...can't be. Though it has been a while since I was in love. The feeling is strange, like the excitement of setting out on a new journey but realizing just as the adventure begins that it's destined to end. The sadness that follows, like huzun. Not that I'm condemning this relationship to failure already - it is only in its early stages - but there is a certain madness in this particular love that frightens me. I'm in love with madness, her madness, her chaos. I've been swept away by its swirling winds, buffeted into submission. It consumes me.

But it also inspires me. I'm writing poetry again, albeit confused, questioning verse. Heavy with uncertainty:

[Singularly Multiple]

We're subject to this closeness.
It binds us like parentheses,
Marks the limits
Of our secret world.

We are objects of this distance.
It divides us like hyphen:
Two solitudes longing for touch,
A severed narrative seeking resolution.

This is how our story unfolds-
In conflicted punctuation,
In grammatical fits and starts;
Too many question marks,
Your ellipses, suggesting...
Infinitely.

Colons and semi-colons,
Commas, slashes, and dashes.
Misplaced periods.
So much left unsaid,
So much left to linger,
Like ghosts floating between the lines.

Can solitude and intimacy coexist?
Can we be singularly multiple?
United and separate?
If the "we" exists within us,
Can it also exist between us?

Closeness demands that I ask these questions.
Distance shrouds the answers.

Not bad...for a start. Perhaps the block doesn't exist at all. I'm writing...right now in fact...the words are coming. But for work, for the article that's still sitting unfinished and the future articles, the words are sparse, elusive. Uncertainty also plagues those narratives but the genre demands certainty. That is the dilemma.

I think what I need most right now is to immerse myself in work. Tomorrow I head back to the cottage in Olimpos. At the end of June, onward to Iraq. The words will come. They have to.