I have lost count how many times I’ve printed it, how many times I’ve signed my name at the bottom in a weird archival pen that won’t fade in sunlight. I’ve never tried to keep tally on how many envelopes it’s gone into, how many different addresses around the world. I just know something simple:
When someone loses someone they love, it’s words they come looking for, it’s poetry they need.
When a funeral or memorial is looming like some storm cloud just over the mountains on the horizon of their life, when all things seem to crash and crumble, when tomorrow is stained not with promise but with absence, more than all things it is understanding we seek. It is the comfort that comes with knowing you’re not alone in what you’re enduring.
That somewhere, someone, has come through it too.
More than all poems I have written, it’s the one below that is requested, the one below that I send them. It is Typewriter Series #690, as all my poems carry numbers instead of titles. It is words for those that remain, it’s the ache named for those left trembling.
They are only words, just simple letters that sit with other simple letters and form simple words that become uncomplicated sentences.
They come from this imperative in me that teachers since the very beginning called useless, called unnecessary, called frivolity and a dead-end road that would never make me a living.
Oh this beautiful uselessness.
I just spent all of September writing about Dead Poet’s Society, and today I’m reminded of the message that stuck with me far above any other. It was not Carpe Diem that resonated upon first finding it, it was not O Captain My Captain, it was the entire speech in the video below. It was this monologue, and I will paste it here in its entirety in case you wish to read it rather than hear it delivered.
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” “Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
It is not solely grief that sends strangers knocking on my door. It is not just loneliness or longing, sorrow or the sweet serenade that surrender sings when we find ourselves haunted by sadness.
It is love, too. It is love, always.
Maybe more than all others combined, it is love that brings people whose hands I do not know to me, whose laughter is still a language I’ve not yet learned. Love found, love awaited, love being fought for. Love the pool their toes just begin to dip into, or love in a form so deep and true that it makes two wish to join themselves into one thing, to bind their hands or put rings on fingers or speak promises into the only space left unfilled between them. The terrifying closing of that final gap.
I’ve been asked to help others find words for proposals, for second dates, for the telling of a story they know not how to define as the poetry it’s always been.
It is not law, not medicine, not the engineering of a bridge or a home that I do, not these useful pursuits that would serve the world in a way that would also pad my pocket and make it so much easier to feed my family. It is poetry, it is photography, it is writing and hoping a community is built up around the thoughts that stir from somewhere dark and deep inside me.
It’s this beautiful uselessness, it’s this gorgeous frivolousness that is why I am here, what I “stay alive for.”
There is no shame in me for this. There is no wish or regret or some secret great ruing that stirs in me. Some have guitars in closets that call to them like siren songs from sea-soaked rocks, for some it is sketchbooks, poetry of their own no one has ever been allowed to read. It’s all these useless things we are told are hobbies and nothing more, that they are silly, they are for the quiet hours after the real work has been done, the private things that live in the space that’s left after a living is earned or the smarter choices.
A living earned, and it is here I so greatly struggle.
To be alive is to earn it, to endure the rollercoaster that is this human existence. To wake, to struggle, to breathe, to keep a heart beating on a planet that spins and orbits and storms and surges. To navigate the minefields of interaction, to survive the sorrows and the sadnesses, but more, to notice, to celebrate, to treasure the millions of little astonishments that disguise themselves as such ordinary things.
To revel in the beautiful uselessness, to pursue it as the truth more important than all others.
To see, to seek, to share.
I am here but a blip, a half-blink of a single eye in a cosmos filled with uncountable others. I will make my time here matter in every way I know how, I will sit and chase down these slippery little sentences so I can give them back to you.
I will aim my camera at the sunsets, the hidden smiles, the moments on a street far from those you call your own. I will create music from my suffering, I will help you find words to explain the love you have found. I will make art, as Glen Hansard begged me to do when he won his first and only Oscar, I will make art, I will make art.
I will, because it is what we stay alive for. It is, perhaps, the most noble of all pursuits, though it be not well-paid. It is this we reach for when we are hurting or lonely, when we are broken and we swear we cannot be repaired. It is this we seek when we find something so beautiful it races our heartbeat or silences our voice or steals our breath or sends us gasping into the disbelief that it, all of it, can possibly be so beautiful.
It is this, it has always been this, this perfect, shining, staggeringly lovely uselessness.
I promise. I will.
I Love you all.
Be good.
