~ emotions ~
James Bowden
What the hell do I feel?
Hot. Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling everyone who asks me.
That’s certainly what’s at the forefront of my mind as I flee the broken AC of my stuffy apartment
to take refuge among the familiar red and white stripes and grease and dying palm trees.
That’s certainly what I told my hairdresser. And my roommate. And my Lyft driver. And my cousin.
And my PSTP friends.
I don’t feel fucking anything. Or maybe I feel everything.
Is it possible to become desensitized to one’s own emotions?
I always thought my dad was a man of few emotions.
My mom disagreed. She said he locked them up deep inside his brain and threw the key away.
That he feared them because they controlled him. Overwhelmed him. That they haunt him.
Undoubtedly a great recipe for a happy family.
Is it even possible to be fully in control of one’s emotions?
Doesn’t that conflict with the very fucking definition of emotion?
Raw feeling. An output given an input.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can control how we interpret and act upon them.
The raw feeling is there all the same. What better excuse is there than innateness?
Don’t lie to me, you childish idiot. You’re no robot.
Perhaps an overloaded heap of grey matter trying to process too many outputs.
Trying. Failing.
Why do I feel so fucking binary?
Either react to every emotion or to none.
All or nothing. And now I am that which I most resented in my father. The better I get to know
myself, the better I understand him. Maybe we’re all control freaks because of what it means to
have been a child.
Cold. I’ve never told anyone that.
But we all know that eventually the heat must give way and what else can follow?
My heat death.
Who’d have thought?
Does that make sweating out of my ass like a dog worth savoring the same way we lie to ourselves
and try to appreciate the brevity of this life?
Fuck being refined. I want to be raw. I want to go supernova. Not fucking red dwarf.
And yet the very definition once again highlights how temporary it all is. I can’t handle the idea of
not being eternal.
I want to be dynamic. I swear. Or at least not static.
I want to be forever. Definitely don’t have to swear that one to convince myself.
I want to be alive. And feel it too.
Orwell is brilliant. Yeah, the Party was fucked up. But I could get behind a NewSpeak in which all
words expressing infinity, eternity, forever are gone. I wish I could unlearn the concept of
limitlessness.
That’s a lie. As if we ever really have a choice to take the blue pill.
Piso mojado.
Cuídate, mortal.
Your actions. Your mistakes. Your feelings. They will live forever.
Just like you, right? What a joke.
If only I could convince myself that everything that I do, that I am, that I stand for, that I feel, dies with me.
I’m a quarter of the way through my life, for Christ’s sake.
How am I afraid to live with the consequences of my actions?
I know that I’m more afraid to live with the consequences of my inaction. But there’s always a
tomorrow, right? Always potential for better. Maybe it’ll be easier in the future. Clearer.
You’re fucking delusional.
Live every day like it’s your last. Every minute.
You say it, you think it, it’s your goddamned wallpaper, and yet you can’t.
If you think just maybe it’s her
Promise me, young man, you’re gonna let her know.
Yeah, fuck you too Dermot. I’ve still got a whole life left to live. Fool.
Why am I still terrified?
Perhaps alive is a better adjective.
Perhaps it will be brief. Most certainly. Flare and then pull a Warren G. Harding. Doesn’t it always?
But would I want it any other way?
Composure, control, it’s all overrated. Hollow.
I’d rather be a hot mess than a damned icicle. Real life isn’t binary. It’s sloppy. It’s here and now.
What an apt place to be writing this.
It’s never been about the outcome, but the raw feeling.
Who am I kidding. I know which matters more to me.
But it’s time. It always is, or it never is.
So interestingly, this poem serves as a precursor of sorts for “The world isn’t ready for my love”, and “Having a Boba with You”, in that even though it’s mostly not a love poem at all, the last bit I used to tell a girl I had feelings for. Again, no intentions: we were off to college in different places, she had a boyfriend, etc., just thought it would be nice to tell someone that they were loved.
You also get some of this reference style. The lines are from Dermot Kennedy’s After Rain. The reference to Warren G. Harding is because when we learned about him in high school, the main policy he had was “return to normalcy”. Orwell reference is to 1984. And of course, this all takes place in a good ol’ In-N-Out.
With this, and a lot of the other earlier poems, you don’t really get the sense of gentleness that I feel has emerged in my poems from this past year or so. I think I was a lot harsher on myself at this point, hadn’t really learned to love myself or life or anything really. I don’t find them very compelling in large part because of this, which is consistent with what Jenny would tell me.