Connection

Connection


Without a reference point, pain is just sensation.
Is that the case with love as well?
Do we fixate on a concrete beloved to make
love real?  Without the reference point, is it
just another inchoate emotion, free-floating
profundity shooting through like meteor light?
I have known those brief flashes of metaphoric
warmth, imagined connections based on empathy.
Street kids that tugged at my silent heart, I believed
I knew their pain, their reference point.
Alone over decades more than a century, I tell myself
stories about those I see, even briefly meet.  Love is
a beautiful story to tell a frightened child.
I am a nightmare, an evil fantasy.  Is love not
supposed to be my solemn foe on myth’s battle field?
I hear music on the air from a jazz club beneath this
doorway as I walk in shadow.  Romance sounds,
an eerie backdrop, perhaps pealing laughter of my
jesting gods.  It’s not that they do me ill maliciously,
I think.  They are amused by irony.
I no longer prey on the children I had convinced myself
I was saving.  I don’t know why I bought that lie.
I wanted to be close to them, to feel connection, or at
least enough of an illusion that I could believe a
pretty story.
I prey on their predators, abused kids once removed into
their metamorphosed mature stage.  Or maybe sociopaths
by birth, born to be bad?  Wasn’t I once born to be bad?
Have I not over-achieved that destiny?
Is malevolence born into humankind, always ready to
present and destroy?
The great love stories seem bent on destruction.  Is love
more about death than life?  Or is life about death
regardless of what is lived?  Mortals defined by
mortality, by that inevitability?
Yet, mortality is not inevitable, as I know.
I have been so much longer undead than alive as
defined by mortality.  And I could be spreading my
undeadly disease, creating endless macabre progeny.
My kind seems strangely reluctant to reproduce to capacity.
A minion here, a lover there, maybe some experiments or
amusements that soon pall.  I have not succumbed to
such.  The idea, if I follow its narrative, horrifies.
Do potential mothers, pregnant with potential children
who have no interest in being born, disfigured or
precognizant of earthly depredations, do they as
sympathetic hosts feel this horror of gestation’s
consequences?  Are these unborn the true instigators
of abortive maternal acts?  If their mothers are not able,
or sufficiently sympathetic, to comply, is suicide a
rectification, a severly late-term abortion?
What was my mother’s motivation in carrying and
birthing me, so much an abomination?  How long would
I have suffered my life had fate not intervened?
Children do suicide, younger than I when I died and
resurrected by another’s will.  And there are so horribly
many who live in service to death, possibilities of love
scorned, soothed by violence.
All of life feeds.  The gods must love that irony.
Life as ouroboros, ever feeding on itself.