your attentiveness is masked
  by your ambivalence
  to even being here

the discrete fragments of time
  you cling to desperately
  are going to flee anyway
  so fuck, why worry?

your lack of focus on what’s going on
  right here
  right now
  betrays the straying in your heart
  that has made you feel
  almost wraith-like for months now;
  are you even real?
  are you an integrated whole?
  are you so self-alienated
    that you can’t even integrate the words
    that you seem to hear,
    the words that I strive to say explicitly  succinctly  directly?

you’ve got to know that your future is perpetually forked with two roads
  the new one is solid and paved and trustworthy with reliable bridges
  and the other one is a dotted line
  an intermittent stream on a map
  a stream that doesn’t even exist in the summer
  but in the fall experiences flash floods—tragic aren’t they?

and you don’t even know that there’s a fork
  shooting off in that solid direction
  because you only look up enough
  to see the dotted line bits
  you don’t notice its absence
  the rest of the time
  you might as well be a zombie
  and how attractive  and alluring  and intriguing  and lustworthy  is that!

and did you even know there were lines
  solid or dotted
  or is it all just the 3:00am drunken stumbling through
  the life that could so easily be one of intent and willing openness to serendipity
  and the blending of souls whose lifelines
  run close to
  or parallel to
  or intersect with yours
  but no
  no one intersects with you 
  cuz you don’t even engage
  and all we do
  at best
  is approach a tangent
  with you

but you need to know
  whether this gets through to you at all or not
  is that your attentiveness is worth something to me
  hell  it’s worth a lot
  because once your soul/life/being
  is on the existing portion of your dotted line
  it has moments of richness
  that bless us all
  even if your radar is off

and we all weep sometimes
  and not just metaphorically
  because everyone’s soul is deep enough
  for embracing
  and we’ve all seen the tip of your iceberg
  and we like it
  and we want you
  because you have so much to give
  and so much to receive
  that as we’re all interdependently intertwined with each other
  missing out on you
  is about as tragic as it gets

please hear me

please

Copyright 2002, Stephen Buckley
08.28.02, 1030pm