National Poetry Month 2018: What I Have to Offer (Day 1)

Hello friends! Welcome back to the blog. I have posted about three and a half times since last April, which is a testament to A. How busy I've been and B. How important it is to blog during other times of the year.

Once again, I will be posting a poem a day for the month of April. Some of them will be written during this month and some of them will be older, but I promise that (unless you have access to my secret poetry blog) you haven't seen them before.

Enjoy

What I Have to Offer
Written October 16, 2017

Here is what I give to you,
to all of you, the least of you,
to the most deserving but also
those who want it gone.
I will give it for all and forever.
The gift goes on and on.

It is soft like mothers’ whispers,
if you are battered by sound.
It gently beats, never retreats,
it is safe to speak around.

But it is also for the others
who need to hear it thunder,
who need to feel the shake of life
to wake them from the dead of night,
to throttle fear into disarray,
this is what I give away.

I cannot give it otherwise,
it can only laugh or cry,
it is not stable, it does not merit
apathy, if you can bear it.

And I cannot keep it to myself,
or to only one of you, the least of you,
I cannot only give to the best of you,
I can only give it to completion,
without fullness there is no creation,
it simply will cease to be.

I don’t care if you don’t want it.
It’s already out of my hands.
I have to give it away, it’s just
who I am.

Five Years a Loser

Five years ago today I stood in the drizzling rain at the edge of Capitol Lake in Olympia, Washington and a young man got down on his knee to ask if I would marry him. I didn't say yes. I cocked my head and said, "Yeeaaah..." because hard consonants were hard. I mean difficult. They were difficult. 

In retrospect I feel that a more confident answer would have been unlike me. It was this moment I knew was coming but nothing really prepares you for when you're finally in it. Yes, I wanted to marry him. We'd known we wanted to get married almost from the very beginning of our relationship. Still, when that time comes and you have to actually face the thing you have been wanting, the decision seems much more overwhelming and incomprehensible than it did when you were just dreaming about it. 

And in that moment, regardless of how confident my answer was, I forged my loser-ness with his loser-ness. We were losers together, even before the wedding. Before the vows and the rings and then the road trip cross-country and the fights and confusion and the years of wedded insanity... we were first losers together when I said, "Yeaaah..." Because for the first time, we had this tangible thing that was ours. A relationship is between two people but it is much more fluid and unpredictable than an engagement. An engagement is definitively us, it has a goal for us made by us which will be carried out by no one but us. 

On that day, we lost our selves--because a marriage begins long before the vows. A marriage begins when two people agree to get married and consequently agree that every decision from here until eternity is made by both, not one. 

Sure, I decide when I want to write a blog and he decides when he wants to buy coffee and we all decide when we're going to use the bathroom or make phone calls or cuddle with the dog. But we become aware that all things, even those small things, affect the other person and we begin to take that into account. This is the mindset that begins before marriage: you lose your self to accomodate the us that has just been made. So if I want to write a blog but I need to fold laundry, I do the laundry first. If he wants to buy coffee but it will make me late for work he skips out on the latte. We sacrifice and lose out on things we want for ourselves in order to benefit us as a whole. 

And in all the world there is no one I am more thankful for, more blessed by, more willing to be a loser with. 

I love you, Joseph. You make us such incredible losers.