Well since you all had such a staggering response to my last post, I've decided if you're not gonna comment you can give Petrarch the silent treatment. He's been dead for a while. He can take it better than I can.

Translation by Robert M Durling from Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics

Poem #36 (which I have renamed Ne Quitte Pas after the Nina Simone cover)

If I thought that by death I would be lightened of this amorous care that weighs me down, with my own hands by now I would have consigned to earth these burdensome members and that weight;

but because I fear that it would be a passage from weeping to weeping and from one war to another, still on this side of the pass that is closed to me I half remain, alas, and half pass over.

It would be time for the pitiless bowstring to have shot the last arrow, already wet and colored with blood;

And I beg Love for it, and that deaf one who left me paitned with her colors and does not remember to call me to her.

Yes it seems I have a singular talent for trading weeping for weeping and war for war. There are those who seem to believe that this can be fixed. And I was one of those who believed.

Past tense.

Even the most fervent idealist must confront reality at some point. Freud believed that depression was the result of reality impigning upon fantasy. Or, in other words, depression is the mourning a dream. Often we feel the loss of our fantasies with far more accuity than we do the loss of real objects or people. Our dreams are more real to us than our realities.

Poem 46 (excerpted)

Therefore my days will be tearful and cut short, for it is rare that a great sorrow grows old, ...

These were made besides the waters of hell and tempered in the eternal forgetfulness whence the beginning of my death was born.

One of the members of the boy posse has been whining about having to come up with an alternative poem for his eulogy (who writes their own eulogy?). I happened across this poem Saturday morning. Should anyone remember this post when I die, feel free to read my edited version of Poem 207.

Poem 207 (excerpted)

I feed on my death and live in flames:...

A hidden flame is hottest, and if it grows it can no longer be hidden in any way. Love, I know. I feel it at your hands. You saw it well when I so silently burned; now my own cries pain me, now I go a nuisance to near and far.

O world, O vain thoughts! O my strong destiny, where do they carry me? Oh from how lovely a light was that tenacious hope born in my heart, with which she binds and oppresses it...The fault is yours, mine the loss and suffering.

Thus from loving well I gain torments...for I should have turned away from the excessive light, closed my ears to the siren song; and still I do not repent that my heart is overflowing with sweet poison.

I am waiting for him to loose that last arrow who shot the first: and, if I judge aright, it will be a kind of pity to kill quickly, since he is not disposed to make of me anything but what he usually does; he dies well who escapes from sorrow.

...Servant of Love who read these lines, there is no good in the world that is equal to my ills.

The title of this post comes from the fact that I have been bound not to write about quite a few people in this life. For every person who wants to be blogworthy, there is one who wishes to be anonymous. Strangely it is usually the men whom I eventually bed who never want to appear here. The only exception to that rule was Rabid. Ah Rabid. She would be pleased if she could see me now. Walking around hell in my flipflops trying to fend off demons with nothing but a spatula.

And a plastic one at that.

Weeping for weeping...war for war. As a teacher, when will I ever learn?