I crave no-one.
But I do crave someone.
I crave something and
I imagine someone who will satisfy me.
I crave putting on a show –
for strangers, acquaintances, and friends
not intimate enough to give up the show for.
The performance distracts me from my being,
its painfulness.
I crave the matching of my energy
to the light make-believe happiness of the crowd,
the other walkers-in-the-park,
the corner store employees who vaguely know me.
I crave the person who will tell me
I am okay, someone I can trust and believe.
I am not that person.
That person may come –
I know I will find him if I look-
but he is an illusion,
and his comfort will fade away,
or worse, it will spoil and sour, because
It Just Doesn’t Work That Way.
I crave someone who will look at all of this –
this predicament I am in,
my desperate attempts to escape it –
and sigh, and tell me that THIS is also okay,
this ridiculous craving,
this struggle from the trap of my own mistakes.
I am not that person either.
And my craving is unfillable, a paradox,
because what I crave goes against the Nature of Things,
because the Nature of Things is:
Never expect someone else to fill your hole.
You yourself created your hole,
and though you may fill it now,
you will just keep digging more,
your entire way of being is digging this hole,
you think you could get rid of it
by having some charming backhoe driver resurface you?
No, you must stop digging.
That is the only way.
I know this, and yet I crave
the filling of the hole, in any which way,
by hook or by crook,
but still the Nature of Things is:
You are your holes.
Hire a backhoe to fill them and you only bury yourself
under foreign sterile sand, and
you fail to meet that great injunction, to Know Thyself, and
you have filled the hole but emptied yourself.
Holes are never what they seem on the surface.
Cravings are those intense feelings
which we think are pain,
which we think might kill us, and for
which we have an imagined, ready-made solution.
A solution which itself might kill us.
The craving is actually the real danger,
the craving is actually Hidden Death.
Not surprising after all;
It is both stale and powerful,
which usually means bad news.
The only thing to do is to
learn to live with the holes,
learn to love with the holes,
learn to sing with the holes.
If you knew the holes were never going to go away,
if you admitted this,
then what would you do?
You would say to yourself either,
Well then I might as well die,
or I might as well live.