O Rose
There is a fake fabric rose on my desk at work (figure 1). It's now been there for a few days. I haven't thrown it away, and I haven't found away to make a lady's day with it. Yet. And I'm not really sure how it got there, but it's still there and I don't think I'll let it go just yet.
When I was younger and just about to finish high school I remember reading about a writer who I admired at the time who said he memorized poetry to get girls. Now I wasn't anywhere close to getting girls at that time, so I considered my options, and I decided to adopt this as my playbook. This aforementioned admired author had said he memorized Shakespeare. For me that seemed terribly traditional and telegraphed. I decided to go for verse and writers that were a bit more obscure making me and my knowledge of the both more valuable in turn making me more perfect.
And maybe for one of the first time in my newly inherited young adulthood, I followed through. I sat and stood, and I paced, all in the middle of my mother's living room. I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a few books. I looked for books and collections and writers that would truly honor the person I was or at least the person I hoped to project. And I brought them home, like I mentioned earlier, and I went in on memorizing. I never knew that I would actually spend my free non-scholastic time dedicated to memorizing verse, but I did, and I did it successfully.
Yes, I come clean and say I have regurgitated poetry on unassuming young ladies, and I won't say it was what sealed the deal, but as apart of my closing, let's just say I was hard to resist. I never thought it would work, and I never thought I would have fallen in love like I have, and furthermore, that a beautiful girl or two would have fallen in love with me, but again, it all worked.
Over the last few days I've been feeling emotionally out of whack. My initial diagnosis objectively saw that my schedule had gone through a sudden and drastic shift. Therefore I was laboriously (or lack there of) trying to reassocicate myself to this rescheduled world. However, as time continued, this emotional funk lingered. I then jumped back into reading and writing. I started a reread of a pocket-sized anthology edited by Simon Van Booy titled Why Our Decisions Don't Matter (Also see figure 1). There's some really strong rhetoric stretching across the gamut of minds and thinkers from antiquity through the present. There's undercurrents of anti-religious sentiment, and there are small vignettes that see God as pure epistemology and the force thereof. A few of the pieces I had even read, as apart of there larger initial work, and it was nice to see those in a different more demanding context. It is just a really nice collection.
I didn't know what I expected to find. Maybe validation, maybe pure hopelessness, or maybe the constant ringing of hopefulness that is only found in complexity. But as I turned through and to the last few pages I was brought back to my mother's living room as a young boy, before some of my future and now past decisions could ever been thought as possible, memorizing poetry solely to just impress a girl or two. What I saw is what I still have memorized and what I still hold dear to my heart.
The Sick Rose
by William Blake
O Rose thou art sick,
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Without Relent,
Peace
Remoy