LOVE IS NOT JUST AN EMPTY WORD, YOU KNOW.

When you are in transition, you find out who your real friends, your real family is.

People like to use the word ‘love’ allot, they like to say ‘I love you’, because it makes them feel good to.

They feel that the word accomplishes the deed.
These same people tend to be duckers, avoiders, they say that they are kind and simple people, whilst all the while hiding in the shadows from anything real, anything that confronts their delicate sensibilites. These people don’t love anyone except themselves.

They use the word Love to pass themselves amongst us undetecting their crippled empathy.

Love isn’t just a word, it’s a deed. And I know the love of others from the deeds that they do; not just for me, but for the people around them, the people they are connected to. I am so fortunate that they choose to feel connected to me and connected to my destiny. They’ve been helping me, helping me cope with this radical change, this transculture shock, this adapting to a world ruled by dollar and motorised vehicle. It’s taking me time. I’m sometimes lost and confused and I don’t really know the people here at all. Do they ever keep their word in California or are integrity and Truth old world conventions? I honestly wonder that.

Anyway, here is a poem I wrote this morning for the deceased daugher of a mother who barely knows me, having only met me twice before and yet when she heard I was in need, she knew I had been a friend to both her daughters, she opened her home to me. She’s lonely and lacks the company so now I ma beignning to understand how life fulfills needs, sometimes effortlessly, by side stepping our intentions and connecting us to where we belong.

When Daisy offered to put me up for a couple of nights, she hadn’t heard what had recently happened to me; getting mugged in NYC, having my ex step mother pull the rug out from under my accommodation, closing my bank account without my knowledge. Then the ever uncertain apartment in La Jolla. Never sure as to the availability or the date of access. An apartment I haven’t even been permitted to see but must be paradise just because it is in La Jolla. “Do you know how much it costs to rent an apartment in La Jolla?!” Is the monotoneous refrain I’m greeted with whenver I question the eccentricity of the complex. I guess I’m supposed to shut up and be impressed.

When Daisy heard about what was happening to me, how my friends were treating me upon my return from nearly 40 years away, (berating me for not driving!), she opened her heart and offered me her dead daughter’s, my high school friend’s room for as long as I needed it.

That, my friends, is Love.
Daisy doesn’t have to say anything, she doesn’t have to use the word.
She just does it.

So this one’s for Daisy, who knows what the word ‘Love’ means and for Meryl, who died too young.

Zelda

Meryl, we called you Zelda
after Zelda Fitzgerald.

Who you were like,
and now like her,
You are dead.

No more lion’s mane
flipped in perpetual disdain.
No more dietary restrictions
Or hypochondriac fits.

You are beyond that now.
You are beyond all of us.

No more smoking cigarettes
propped on the curb of our high school years.
You were plump then and kind

When you fancied me you held my hand
Softly on that curb.
But then you were thin
and I never had enough money for you.

Meryl, you were a bitch
the way you treated some people
like your sister, like your mother,
Like me.
All who loved you.

Who wouldn’t not love you?
A single, scarlet California poppy
standing like a nun in a field.
Who couldn’t love Zelda Fitzgerald?
None of us never could.