Idealized Forms for Secret Thoughts

My relationship with Tina spurred me to work with words. The elevated feelings of love give way to noble thoughts. They seek outlet in words of tenderness and acts of giving and sharing. The first words I tooled together for other than required academic work sprouted from these feelings and thoughts. Like people similarly affected through centuries immemorial I wrote lyrics, lines meant for singing.

In a cramped room on an empty ward at Clark Air Base Hospital that I shared with Arturo, I began to write verses in a blue-and-red lined Corona Stenographic notebook. While my roommate was on duty at the Emergency Room, busy with Med Evacs from the war then raging in Vietnam, I jockeyed words together to express what I was too scared to say aloud even to myself. Poems couched secret thoughts into idealized forms.

Emptiness

18 September 1973

I tear myself away

From deep within the caverns of my room,

Scene of my cantonment rich in gloom.

Outside the leaden skies hang low.

The air is rank with not-yet-fallen rain.

No-sound proclaims the habitude of pain.

Upon a cankered yellow rose I watch

Ants build mud cradles for the flood,

Oblivious to my emptiness inside.