The Sadness

when was it the sadness? did I tell you to forget it or was it just like the burden of a thinking man that thinks before and after he speaks who has to open doors without doorknobs and when did I realize that everyone was not as far away as i and began to feel that awful alone the stranger in a crowd of friends it is an alien world that keeps me here and understand please understand i often crave the grave of alone for it is there among screams that travel unnoticed to you, lover, that i must create rains for uneasy volcanoes and it’s no fault of anyone this quiet torment that forces pen to paper that sports thought too sharp to be accepted it’s no wonder i am cut within for i have accepted what others call impossible please, my lover, my other alone it’s a wall i must destroy oh god perhaps it is hard for you to understand it all at times i wish i were ignorant full of blind passion with no-one to bother i want you to know me all and i know you cannot and i cannot but i will never let go for it is beauty and beauty with neglect grows cold like an unfed fire i cannot hide my mind and yet the bars i see about me are perhaps bars to keep me out from understanding the simpler things the quiet things the peaceful. yes, i am a hard man who wants all that is near impossible who spreads himself free among so many habitual ideas and it is hard for me for you to break so many habits to bring so many tears but what can I do my woman but tell you that the love is there in places left silent there is that singular you and everything to share not drugs not words but minds perhaps i never lived inside but always existed outside you and its not enough to say “all right” but to say “we’ll try.” copyright 1972 Joseph Adler