I am tired.

POSTED IN essays January 20, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am tired.

Damn damn damn. I would not have you find me so led by others, but perhaps you are right.

I realize how I am so unrefined and stupid. I get down because I do fight the blues. I do suffer from what I accuse other of suffering from, vanity. I seek praise. I seek to impress you certainly. Maybe I have written four or five really good poems. I fear I have lost my ability in writing. I don’t know if it is in the medications I take, or in my attitude, in my lack of love, or lack of desiring love. I admit, I miss trying to woo you. I apologize for this. First, it is not something I should have done,  and I apologize that when I tried, I did it with all my heart.

I tell you sometimes I see your picture and it is difficult to keep my promise to myself and to my wife. I fight to maintain a situation that never improves.

I send you the beginning of a poem I did not send you because it was no good. But here are my feelings in a few sentences.

We lie shivering in our bed
I believe, if I were to uncover you
I would see the steam rise
and that if I might warm my hands over your fire
all would be well
Believe me a fool
I love Estella
Ophelia
and women of my own creation

I was raised as a fool, and maintain this foolishness. You paid for my years of foolishness with the words from my wife. I still am sorry you caught the heat.

Sometimes I don’t know what is real and what isn’t. I fight the desire to sleep my days away and dream of young women walking the shore in Crete. Or past muses (not you) lying in my bed in Florence. I am in love with all the pre-Raphaelite models like Lizzie Siddal. I love Botticelli’s models. I love my own characters. I love Lippi’s women, or Daphne in the Bernini sculpture. I see women speaking flowers. I dream of making love while flying on a magic carpet (really). For awhile, with you and the other muse, I would hold my hands up in the air, in the dark, in bed, and hope, pray, ask for your ghosts to visit. No, just to sit with me and run your hand over my brow. God help me, but that is who I am. I do not believe in spirits but in the divine spirits perhaps.

I think of you as a divine spirit. As goddess. As vampire perhaps that I would gladly die for. I wish–I wish I had my wife back. I wish she thought me not stupid and unable to speak and devious. I wish she found me sexy or at least, bearable.

Now you know. So, believe me led. Believe me silly. Believe me without skill. But believe me.

I am just a man full of memories. That is all there is. I remember the old days. Yes, women who sprinkled baby powder on them who would kiss me for hours. Women who danced with me in velvet dresses and then lifted the dresses later in the car. When I am not dreaming, I am imagining sitting in a room in North, in the cool evening, with a midnight sun, and talking and being nervous with someone I desire who I should not desire. Looking her in the eye, and then looking down, and listening to that marvellous, small, intelligent voice.

I imagine too much, and live too little in the real world. So, the real world makes me dull.

Tomorrow there will be church and more proverbs and the wisdom. And sometimes I wish the hell with wisdom.

I ache sometimes damn it. So, there you go. This is me. The worst and the best of me. The dreamer and the man who can not live real life and can’t leave it.

 

 

Fernando Cordoba