78 Loneliness poems

people talk about loneliness is only sexual companionship that's soon forgotten people talk about solitude beneath its seven layers nobody can talk about solitude and soledad well, there is no english translation

I think I always liked the game because it sounded like my name combined with the concept of alone. (My name really does mean “alone” in Slovenian!) We don’t actually care if it’s true, but we want to know the person telling us is telling us the truth. Say his name is “Hank,” as in, “of hair.” (It’s not.) My upbringing was classically smooth/chaotic, apart from traumatic events I’ve never detailed, even to myself. Traumatic but methodical. But why say what happened even. In the tech block the blinds were down and I cleared my way to the final marble under the indistinct gaze of an indistinct master. My success had allowed me to become the bastard I always knew I could be. What did it mean, to clean the board like this, counting down to one? By these gradual and orderly subtractions my persona was configured. The goal was to remain single. Sometimes telling you the truth wouldn’t be telling you anything much. For a while I’ve felt torpid and detuned, as if I want to share a view with you, so we can both be absent in one place. Look, the sky is beautiful and sour. I’m not here, too. I’m staring out of this cloud like an anagram whose solution is probably itself. I am only the method that this stupid game was invented to explain.

It’s something they carry with them – explorers  night shifts  seamen – like a good pair of binoculars or a camera case perfectly and deeply compartmented. It has a quiet patina that both absorbs and reflects like a valuable instrument you have to sign for – contract with alone – and at the end of the voyage you get to keep. Sometimes it’s very far away. Sometimes so close at first you think the person next to you is picking up  putting down a personal cup a book in another language before you realise what – when talk has moved off leaning its arms on someone else’s table – is being handed to you.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded; Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Someone, and no matter who, inhabits my head like it’s an empty house, he enters, he leaves, he bangs each door behind him, powerless I put up with this ruckus. Someone, and maybe it’s me, palms my most private thoughts, he crumples them, returns them to dust. Someone, and it’s much later now, slowly walks across the room and, not seeing me, stops to contemplate the havoc. Someone, and no matter where, collects the pieces of my shadow.

Sweet beast, I have gone prowling, a proud rejected man who lived along the edges catch as catch can; in darkness and in hedges I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling conspicuously alone. I curled and slept all day or nursed my bloodless wounds until the squares were silent where I could make my tunes singular and violent. Then, sure as hearers came I crept and flinched away. And, girl, you've done the same. A stray from my own type, led along by blindness, my love was near to spoiled and curdled all my kindness. I find no kin, no child; only the weasel's ilk. Sweet beast, cat of my own stripe, come and take my milk.

Wandered tonight through a city as ruined as a body with broken ribs and a bared heart. Looked for you there with cookies in my pocket, searched for a sigh, for movement in demolished streets and alleys. Tonight since I’d forgotten for a moment where you are, I searched for you with hope in my bones. But no matter how I lured you with my voice and my eyes, walls of debris grew up steadily around you, cellars seemed to creep around you. I remained alone with those cookies in my pocket and kept calling and walking.

You are part of other people but not like them. You live in a little wooden box and wake up with your face in your palm and some sunlight. Which is a sign of resignation but not for you. Which is part of what I meant by trying to effect change in myself and also talking. By describing to you that before a city can become spectacular its buildings must put on an iron gown. And then some workers climb all around it. And it is like having no teeth because you are waiting for better teeth. I tell you I am very attached to my old teeth. In a game called all of this is hypothetical I did not once slide my teeth across the table. I do not even remember what you offered as the hypothetical exchange for a life where I only drink soup. There were some girls on their bikes and wind. There were some people reuniting after many years apart or just a day. You were not like everyone else making demands with wild gesticulations. I thought about maybe trying to sharpen my knowledge of jokes. I thought about really needing a hug. A very important car with sirens rumbled by and sounded exactly right.

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed, offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me— I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things— she’d decided that I was after all all right ... twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant, which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected, but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted, what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.

Well, this is nothing new, nothing to rattle the rafters in the noggin, this moment of remembering and its kissing cousin the waking dream. I wonder if I'll remember it? I've had a vision of a woman reclining underneath a tree: she's about half naked and little by little I'm sprinkling her burial mounds with grass. This is the kind of work I like. It lets me remember, and so I do. I remember the time I laid my homemade banjo in the fire and let it burn. There was nothing else to burn and the house was cold; the cigar box curled inside the flames. But the burst of heat was over soon, and once the little roar was done, I could hear the raindrops plopping up the buckets and kettles, scattered out like little ponds around the room. It was night and I was a boy, alone and left to listen to that old music. I liked it. I've liked it ever since. I loved the helpless people I loved. That's what a little boy will do, but a grown man will turn it all to sadness and let it soak his heart until he wrings it out and dreams about another kind of love, some afternoon beneath a tree. Burial mounds—that's hilarious.