Rene Galvan '99

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If life is the stuff which poetry is made of it is violent emotions which provide the painful contractions to the creative force from which new poems are born

if you love without evoking love in return— that is if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent-a misfortune.-Karl Marx

Like the last leaf of an autumn tree i tenaciously cling to that which holds my world together. Afraid to admit that my world may flutter away into some boundless abandonment of all that has brought me to where i am. Ay Dios mio! i want to wail to my God who i no longer find it fashionable to believe in, not even indulging in the consolation of private prayers. But i still do penance than acceptable social condition.

my wish to elapse time back to a night wrapped warmly in your arms would re-enact nothing but memory, i cannot change the size and shape of the world you embrace to accommodate my dreams.

that your love is large and soft and tenacious with strong hands and never still mouth is what has carried me to this pen. on this bleak, cold winter's eye where my heart and my head have become a prism of shattered feelings.

i've always been an arsonist (and a plagiarist!)and like sun on a leaf through broken glass my feelings catch fire They are self-destructive, my fingers burn, i watch. I want to make coals and distribute fire. Let these digits be useless. Can my blistered fingers re-do Prometheus' work? Can this love turned to pain learn to be loved again?

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Her non-actions says "no" to me: her love runs deep but not wide enough to span the gulf that lies between us, so 1 not so gracefully accept the hand of friendship—again. I will continue to love even while honoring the unnamed terms and boundaries set forth, your name will remain unspoken in these lines i call poems, and i'll accept pain as an integral part of life as i always have Hot to comprehend pain as a part of the logic of our lives? even on the most level of playing fields we cannot plot happiness To live life non-contradictory we must be willing to accept the entire realm of human experience, as Marx said.

And so with the echo of another voice saying "Don't be sad, porque that would be useless, hay mucho trabajo hacer, take those passions and apply them to your works with others so it may radiate outward, take that heat and burn esos politicians que no treat the people right" Once again i push down the violent emotions and turn them in to... this? My actions, like my words, are both soft and rough, but i know my love is powerful

My love is not impotent, if this love can evoke a common spirit between us, and it has shown that it can, i must find a way to unleash it on the world with an uncommon fury that will do it justice, and through it many things will be possible, even love reciprocated.