Small Things on Waiting for the Doctor - That You Were Are Will Be Uniquely You

Small Things on Waiting for the Doctor
That You Were Are Will Be Uniquely You

Love Poem

26 July  2017

jp melville

Observing from the outside looking in,

Knowing I am on the inside looking out,

I suspect that we the Other, those whom we do not know

Always distant, external, objects to our kinship souls

As a stranger in strange lands

As a diner in a restaurant

As a patient waiting in a hospital clinic

All around my person people whom I will never really know.

We pass in place and time, shared breathing space

Purposes beyond divergent interests

Gaps of a hand width between our bodies only measurable in astronomic time

I will never know the person of the man, sleeping in his chair, sitting across from me

Any more than I will know the hawker on the street below my apartment in Cotonou.

Begs the question of whom do I know,

Measured in time together, shared bodies sweating together in gentle rocking-coupling,

Shared language and talk, or common habits like working from nine to five,

What would I know of that person that could not be exchanged for another?

Might be that I know them as an archetype

She fusses to arrange social connections, evenings out, networks of affirmation

Telling her “I am in this world because of you”

She sighs whispers words of pleasure encouraging deeper in more more pleasure oh my god

We all do we not enjoy desire?

She awaits my attention, always younger than I, expecting that I will listen

Offer of affirmation, yes meaning purpose her path in life though unknown

Offer of affirmation, yes even in not knowing that purpose and meaning are there

Could be just friendship I offer, yes she once acknowledged for just moments in our togetherness

Jocular words “You never know” or “Could be” or “Aren’t they all like that though”

These words never enough, fear and self doubt override compassion companionship

Loneliness rages, cut from the umbilical cord and the child no longer hers the moment each was born

Then tears down her man in rivulets of screams.

Could be I was born in San Antonio or Accra or Chengdu

My friends my family my superiors my strangers would all be the same

Would they not?

After all treat me like I am just the man 

Then the I that is me never mattered.

Maybe there was a way to get to know you

Acknowledging that your non-uniqueness your sameness can only be the one you

Could have abstracted myself from the relationship, just watched, listened, and cared

Because my I interfered with my attention to your you

And if time was truly infinite I would have had the time to get to know

Only through my infinite attention to only you, the you who you were are will be.

Not now with your absence, permanent eternal in appointed exile

I will never have the chance to know that you

Now only in my attention to another, through a mirror of mirage

Through the falsehood of comparison

Will I now never discover

That you were are will be uniquely you.