The summer of my loneliness,
James Bowden
and it’s not even really summer yet, still spring, but
the socal sun has a way of eating into you, distorting
time whichever way you’d least prefer. At times I want
to write to you about how there’s nothing going on,
how available I am and nobody to let me love them,
just books and air, heavy with heat, to hold me. What
is it about complaining that’s so cathartic? But this
suggests release and the truth is much more clingy,
conversing like consolidation of emotional intensity. And
will you blame me for using you? And will you harbor
my weakness against me? No matter–I don’t need
you that much. Not enough to compromise myself.
And so it’s no wonder I’m so alone, I’m smelling every
rose on campus but especially the red ones tinged
with enough purple to make them look luscious,
they’re fragrant without fail, and, me. What does
my face say? Would you get close enough to inhale
me? I even use fragrance-free everything, so that
you might know me, and this is just spitballing now
and everyone knows nothing comes from nothingness,
I’m coping, I’m standing in a field surrounded by
acres of open air except I’m in the middle of Pasadena
on a college campus all the same and I’m the brightest
thing I can see for miles. I like you too. What I’m
trying to ask every time I talk to somebody is: can
you let me be free, and love me too? Help me, even?
I know I’m trying to do so for you, and this, among
other reasons, is likely why you have left me, why I
let you leave so lightly, I don’t believe I’ve any right
to hold anyone even if it be their will and I don’t know,
I could trace this back to my father but that’s beside
the point. I just miss you and don’t want to sound so
clumsily desperate. I want you to understand how
I need you without trying to make you stay. What
good is freedom, you ask–so that we may choose
to be bound, and have it mean something. So that
our lightness may have weight and our weight not
be so light, so chance. Which is to say, I am lonely
by choice, but also out of need.
I didn’t finish this one until more recently, but this poem opened up the flow of poetry again for me (spring of 2023).