Investigative Sherlocking
The lover I still seek
is better than me.
Infinitely small and large,
She has been where I am before,
Where they gave her trophies she wouldn’t accept.
But you can see them in her eyes.
The answer to everything is in her now
and at no other time.
She is always slightly out of reach.
The only thing she doesn’t know
is that she is too good for me.
And that’s why I haven’t found her yet.
-Craig Hordlow
craighordlow.com
I want you to be my mistress for a lifetime.
I don’t want to carry the weight of the world with you,
or perpetually and publicly rearrange life’s building blocks
with a goal in mind.
That would be a waste of magic.
I want to sneak into your apartment when there is a blackout,
where you have lit candles and wait for me,
naked under a blanket,
our bodies greet each other with a warm shiver,
refugees from the dutiful, the routine.
We preserve our sense of wonder as if it is life itself,
We will not get in line and march,
We will not waste the magic.
-Craig Hordlow
craighordlow.com
When you’re young,
you look for something to worship,
you find a uniform,
adopt an identity,
become a noun.
Then you rebel;
you resent not having your own identity,
you are suicidally disgusted with yourself
for exuberantly accepting a generic mystique.
And when you finally try to be unique,
most of your energy is spent criticising others
because it is easier to define what you are not
than what you are.
Eventually you grow tired of identity jockeying,
and realize there is nothing to be gained
from judging anything other than your own progress.
I’ve been to the bottom and back.
Sometimes I leave because they kick me out,
other times I get enough sense to leave on my own,
but mostly I can’t remember why or how I left.
Usually I have to take a cab home,
and get my car in the morning.
I’ve been to the bottom a lot
sometimes I spend days there.
I take smoke breaks outside the place
which is how I’ve met friends…good friends
though I never know when I’ll see them again.
I carved my name in the bar stool,
change has fallen out of my pockets and is still in the couch.
There is a lot of me there, at the bottom,
but I only leave pieces of me
I won’t need when it’s time
to go back up.
A good poem
captures the essence
of something, or of everything,
in the fewest words possible.
Truth does not need
to sing, campaign, or serenade;
it might take a lifetime to figure out,
but only a sentence to translate.
You’re often in love with strangers,
And still too young to recognize
That none of your fantasies
Have ever become real.
The strongest emotions you feel
Are for those with whom you’ve interacted the least,
The places you’ve never gone, and the things you have yet to do.
With a promising future ahead of you,
You expect nothing from the present.
But someday you will be arrested by your first wrinkle,
And feel old in a bar.
You will no longer look hopefully into the future,
But woefully into the past.
You can tell a true lover by the gifts they give.
When you only get them on occasions,
dutifully,
when millions of people probably got the same thing,
Love is coerced.
The true lover finds you gifts
randomly, accidentally;
the world is the gift shop
for a museum about you.
She brings them to you
in cupped hands,
like a child who has found a lightning bug.
The cuff-links you didn’t know you need,
the poet you love
who just wrote a new book,
a small notepad that fits in your pocket
because you love to write.
The occasion is always,
the reason is just because.
The gifts are the reflection of your presence
in your absence,
and you will never throw them away.
