I enjoyed reading your "rant" because it seems to get to the heart of your powerful emotions. I think you may intend this to be something like a blog, or maybe an open letter to the world.
I am a little shy in responding to some of the specifics in your entry, because I remember feeling a lot of the same things at around your age (and other ages)- and I really don't think anyone could have said anything to make me feel different. But I'm going to give it a try. Please forgive my lame advice.
As for your father, I speak from some experience when I say that having a father who lies or slanders your mother is one of the worst things in life. It is real "Suffering". I am not sure to this day how to deal with it. I do know of an instance in which a daughter - whose situation was much like yours - took the approach of speaking kindly of her father to anyone who would listen (especially other siblings) while at the same time keeping her devotion to her mother. She also made every effort to do nice things for her terrible Dad. Some years later, the Dad was afflicted with the worst kind of guilt over his slander of the mother. While he did not completely change as a person, the daughter got in so much practice at being nice to someone who didn't deserve it, that she is now a leader and counselor in her own right. I'm not sure if this would work in your situation, but perhaps it will help you "think outside the box".
As for your stepmom, is she really in the running for "meanest person alive?" I'd hate to think what kind of award goes with that title. Perhaps a golden hemorrhoid. You could write a story about the awards ceremony.
As for your crush, I suppose this has a lot of bearing on your complaint that your life is full of wanting things that slip from your fingers. OK, I am going to tell you something that you are not very likely to believe, but I'm going to tell you anyway because it is as true as the air you are breathing right now.
The most important thing about your love for this young man is the longing you feel. It isn't this particular young man (as worthy as he might be) or even the beauty of romance itself that is important. I promise you that if you get this young man (or any other) the day will come 10 years down the line when you walk out of the bathroom after tripping on his wet towel and seeing him sitting there farting at the breakfast table when you will ask yourself, "I wanted HIM?" The same goes for all the things you long for. They are not worthy of the longing - they will break your heart sooner or later. It is the longing itself that is the great Clue. Let's even call it "holy". That wanting, the longing, is something you must never discard. It is powerful in you right now. You mustn't become like the old crabs who think the longing is just 'nostalgia' or 'adolescent foolishness' and so have learned to keep their hearts from breaking by desiring nothing.
This brings me to your complaint against God. God may be annoying you because He prohibits things that you want to do, and this reminds you of the other things you want that you are prohibited from doing. And how can you know if it is worth following His rules when you can't even feel if He is real?
I said before that your Longing is the great Clue. You desire something that nothing can satisfy - no man, no freedom, no security or significance. If you could really go back to your happiest memories you would find that even then, the joy was more of a memory of something else...the experience itself was not joyous...but the joy came through the experience somehow. Your Desiring is something like that - to paraphrase C.S. Lewis 'a scent of a flower you have never smelled, a tune you remember but have never heard, news from a country you have never visited'. Aisling, the feeling of Longing is the the sense with which you feel God.
And guess what? I'm blushing at the immensely pleasurable way that He fulfills that Longing - the experience of meeting Christ and living for Him. And the funny thing is, the Longing is fulfilled while becoming stronger every day. Most hilarious of all, it is the sort of fulfillment that puts all the other desires in perspective, so that the Farting Breakfast Husband is not so much a heartbreak after all; but He gives you the grace to laugh while you spray him with deodorizer and kiss his bald head.
I guess I am saying that all the things you desire will turn out to be just that - just things. But the desire is like a signpost pointing to Heaven. And in Heaven's light, there will be room to love all the stuff and people who would otherwise break your heart.
Sincerely,
Basilides
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.". ~Lewis
I can't believe it has taken me so long to read some of your poetry. Now that I have, I'm astonished. You have serious, thought-provoking talent.
I wanted to review this poem more for the philosophical depth than anything else. As a "freestyle-with-structure", you have made good use of the connected triplets and the surprising rhyme at the end. Was this written for an assignment - a form I am unfamiliar with? Or is the form your own invention? In either case, it works well and carries the reader along the path of investigation.
Your words capture the human experience well, and instead of simply asserting that we live in a dream (lesser poets would), you infer it from the evidence:
We "live a nightmare", "sleepwalking through each day", and the least corporeal parts of us are most connected to true reality ("the soul feels what is real").
From here you attack the problem of reality like a logician. If reality is a dream, are dreams reality? Is our ability to exist in both worlds a facet of human uniqueness - is this why we are spiritual beings?
Finally, to the skeptic you ask the compelling question: "If this is real why can't we figure it out?" And the material reductionist must give pause when faced with this question, because to him all things must be reduced to material causes. To him, that is reality. But you have reminded him that the thing most within his experience - human living - is the least explicable thing of all.
A tremendous poem from a tremendous talent, Sarah. You have begun my day on a wonderful note.
If I can be so bold to treat this poem as a question posed to me (as in a room full of books after a nice dinner, with family members chatting in the next room and a fire keeping out the cold rain), I would answer like this:
There is one possibility that fits all your facts but does not involve dreams at all - the possibility that we are not all in a dream, but that we are all under enchantment, an enchantment that calls for the strongest of spells to break. Our vision of reality is blurred, not reality itself. Imagine what things would look like if we could reall see?
I enjoyed these lines because it reminds me of thoughts I've had as well. I think this is one of the most critical parts of good poetry: it reminds you of something important.
In this case, Madman, you have succeeded in reminding me of the most important issues...right and wrong, mortality, significance, the fact that we somehow grasp how humans ought to behave yet somehow can't measure up (we have regrets), whether there is any security in comunication after all, destiny and free will, the seeming contradiction between the concept of [i]eternity[/i] and the concept of [i]beginnings[/i], the incongruity of a mind with true insight and those insights coming from purely natural causes - a brain and the movement of atoms in it, and finally the most pressing and vexing mystery of all: [i]What then?[/i]
You have captured the human dilemma, and I admire you and your work here. Most people accept the answers (even, by accident true answers from time to time) without bothering to understand the questions first. You understand the questions.
I wonder if you realize the ingenious progression of wisdom in each stanza. The progression shows that the clues to the answers are contained in the questions. You begin with humanity, then move to nature, then to the nature of your past, then to the the effect of human imperfection and nature and the past to another living soul, then outward to the consequences of freedom (or lack thereof), further outward to the universe itself, then finally to meaning. And in questioning meaning you use the mind as your subject.
It is not a poem of despair to me. It is like the feeling of an unborn child before the first sight of white light and the first searing breath of cold air...anguish and pain, but with unimaginable realization just ahead.
Thank you for this offering.
~Basilides
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