Remedies

This is a poem I wrote circa 2010, not long after a separation heading to divorce. It was an emotionally rough time. I was not just writing these words. I was feeling like a non-person. I didn't know who I was anymore. Most of it is free verse, but the end was meant to be a sonnet. I'm not sure whether I achieved the form well, but I had been reading Shakespeare a lot and was keen to try.

Alone with my thoughts -
these pesky, all-too-familiar fantasies both console and unnerve me.

I'm uncomfortable in my skin,
feeling more like my body

is just a suit I wear, but don't really inhabit.
Where, then, is the real me?
Are these thoughts all I am?
I need the easy distractions of life to scatter my mind,
to make these thoughts diffuse.

What are the remedies for a lonely life?

What is the elixir, the concoction of which we must all balance

between ineffectiveness and overdose?

Money, not originally essential for us, has become so.

We trade work for coin and paper, yet how we value labor

is seen in greed-maniacal slavery to the dollar.
"Having" turns one toward an unsympathetic disposition,
and "having not" binds one to a state of no volition.

Beauty can fool the mind,
luring the eyes to subjects not always worthy of the gaze.
What we excitedly prize as substantive,

of which we lend much talk and attention,

may merely be inconsequential eye candy on closer introspection.

Sex, like food and shelter,
is in the hierarchy of needs.
It covers one like a blanket
and good psychology it feeds.

But tied to money, it comes with a price.
One can be a slave to one's desires.
Once sucked in, once will not suffice.
The flames are only fanned by more fires.

Love endures but does elude as well,
And it controls but cannot be controlled.
We wrestle in its Heaven, and it's Hell.
Abandoning it only tightens its hold.
To say that it is worth the price of pain
Is as irrelevant as breathing water.
None have lived without this emotional bane.
It has been thus for every Son and Daughter.
Just as the teacher is forever taught
So are we always alone with our thought

all rights reserved. copyright 2010 Todd Franklin Osborn