And go on...

[PrinceMyshkin]

He who was never loved
––never sufficiently loved, which
can feel like not having been loved at all
––will extract a terrible toll from the world:
the need for ever more love, other love.

The love that is given to him
will seem inadequate because
he doesn’t believe himself worthy
of being loved and therefore
those who appear to love him
must be defective in some way:
desperate, even more needy
and therefore more untrustworthy than he is.

And so he will welcome any love,
bubble-gum love, bobby-sox love,
baubles and trinkets or rubies and pearls,
a flash, a glint or a torrent

and go on.

[Sweets America]

I am sorry, more than you can imagine. :(
Very sad poem.

[TheFifthElement]

He who was never loved
––never sufficiently loved, which
can feel like not having been loved at all
––will extract a terrible toll from the world:
the need for ever more love, other love.

The love that is given to him
will seem inadequate because
he doesn’t believe himself worthy
of being loved and therefore
those who appear to love him
must be defective in some way:
desperate, even more needy
and therefore more untrustworthy than he is.

And so he will welcome any love,
bubble-gum love, bobby-sox love,
baubles and trinkets or rubies and pearls,
a flash, a glint or a torrent

and go on.


Love, and trust, and need are so intrinsically linked aren't they?

There's a vulnerability to this poem that makes it painful to read, the self questioning, 'spilling of guts' feel to it is palpable. I think we have all been there, at some point.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I am sorry, more than you can imagine. :(
Very sad poem.

Sad, perhaps, but one that some Rapunzel-like creature wove from straw into gold!

[Pendragon]

Whoa, Jer-- that's so longing... I hear an Echo From the Edge in the poem. It is a cry more than a poem, a cry set to rythum, echoing with tinges of despair. Very dark, my friend. I trust you are well.

[littlewing53]

prince, what an extraordinary beautiful poem..yes, i thought the same thing too pen...one must love himself first before he can recognize the love another offers...blessed we are there's always tomorrow...

[PrinceMyshkin]

prince, what an extraordinary beautiful poem..yes, i thought the same thing too pen...one must love himself first before he can recognize the love another offers...blessed we are there's always tomorrow...

Maybe it would be better to start a thread on this theme in general chat or philosophic whatever, but that concept of "self love" has always baffled me. Either I do not understand it or I must say - without self-pity - that I do not love myself nor desire to! I like some things about myself, dislike others but I'd much rather love Mable and Mark and Millie and Morris rather than Me.

[symphony]

Goddamnit! How is it that I'm so much in love with myself?! :sick:

:D So that stanza for me will apply as in

He who was never loved
––never sufficiently loved, which
can feel like not having been loved at all
––will extract a terrible toll from the world:
They need for ever more love, love for themselves!
:lol:

On topic again: I'm not sure about the rest of the poem, but that last "And go on" bit really took me in.

[firefangled]

Maybe it would be better to start a thread on this theme in general chat or philosophic whatever, but that concept of "self love" has always baffled me. Either I do not understand it or I must say - without self-pity - that I do not love myself nor desire to! I like some things about myself, dislike others but I'd much rather love Mable and Mark and Millie and Morris rather than Me.

First, I love the truth of your poem. As many of your poems do, it has a great nobility about it that comes from (of all things we might say) a great humility. It is evident this is a personal quest forged again into words. Perhaps your next poem on this might include this humility as its subject and the way it might complicate self-love by its nature and by the way it is misunderstood in our culture.

Your suggestion for a thread on this might be well received. It is a baffling subject. It is quite evident that you love yourself, but we have the advantage of looking in. I don't know of anyone who can see themselves as others do.

The longing in your poem belongs to us all. I have always thought of it as what has been wrongfully interpreted as Original Sin. I think true love is possible (sufficiently loved), but, as the song says, it is not something we fall into, it's something that we do.

Strangely enough, self-love is not about us; it is about whatever is that spirit inside that speaks to our self. Problem is we all grow up talking to ourselves in our heads and can't usually hear the spirit separate from our own ruminations. Self-love to me is when we find that spirit and see how magnificent it is and we want to protect it and nourish it with great skill and we practice whatever we must to do that.

I think this search and the necessity to continue it in an unfulfilled state might be summed up best by Wallace Stevens in his poem Description Without Place, even though somewhat out of his context:

And because what we say of the future must portend,/Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be/ Like rubbies reddened by rubies reddening.


I have not been around much, so my goings-on are to be forgiven as one old man's experienced ramblings to another slightly older old man :yawnb: with experienced ramblings of his own. What! No thread for this kind of stuff?

I should live so long and still have such grace!

[PrinceMyshkin]

There they are, under the pillows
again, enjoying their furtive,
late-night conversations. It's no use
telling them insanity is rude.
It's what they want to hear.


Charming suicides, they know nothing
about Mozart's worried sweetness.
All they want is to find
an applecart to turn over.
Any old applecart. Love. Or happiness.





J. Newman Sudden Proclamations copyright 1992