Gretchen, Dostoyevsky, and the Problem of Human Imagination

…………………………………………………………to John Bevins


It is the failure to understand your own cognitive processes
and how they can be so different from everyone else’s yet
so strikingly similar, simple, and unforgivably sarcastic,
that drive another day to present itself out of the nothingness
you wish you could immerse yourself into…

Morning catches you
in the midst of last night’s demolition
of the burning, pulsating, bare nerve cells
that she tried so hard to soothe with her presence,
healing you,
 annoyingly,
 like a dripping sink.

Tomorrow
your emotions will explode with millions of senseless needles,
begging and pleading for more of what you never really had.
And the lights of your mind will suddenly go from dim
to threefold of the brightest sun, as you turn away
from the only thing that kept you sane until now.

The drawings in the sand,
her infectious laughter,
the never-ending energy and motivation to change existence
with her paradigmatic sense of humanity and belief in the idea that
beauty will save the world.

You finally close your eyes having waited
impatiently for the last breath of the grumpy cigarette
and even in your mind continue
 to let the rings of smoke get tangled in her hair,
as if she never left.

And you let her thoughts
fly through your breaking heart in perpetual locomotion,
letting them destroy you,
like her healing,
drop
 by drop
 by drop…

These moments
filled with fear of being alone, yet craving to be alone
with demonic thoughts about her,
so angelic, the impossibility of which you attribute to
some invisible power that
appears out of her memories.

The only thing left
is to fall asleep in disbelief
of the unlimited capabilities of the only thing that will never fail –
your own imagination.
But you can’t.

Instead, you pursue the mindless obsession
to mercifully euthanize your intrinsic dead-ends
that you mistakenly equate with such moments,
and memories of such moments.

These moments,
so special,
you swear to cherish them your whole life.
But then,
 they always,
 inevitably,
 just fade away.