Archive for the ‘Years’ Category

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1978-09-17

Sunday, September 17th, 1978 
            This love is so new ---
            on a rose, a drop of dew
            that needs protection
            from scrutinization
            This love makes me spin.
            That line is so thin
            that I'm walking
            I feel like balling.
            This love is so strong ---
            who knows if it will last long?
            I can't shut out the past,
            but I ask:  can it last?
            This love brought on a new light,
            so strong I stay up the night ---
            wondering if it fits me,
            knowing I want and need thee.
            You question as vehemently as I.
            Your questions raise me high.
            And I dash me down ---
            am I but a clown?
            Please give me time, my love,
            nothing else to think of ---
            it may be a fantasy of mine,
            but I hope to make it reality in line.
                              Helen O'flarity
                              september 17, 78
                              written at my apartment

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

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1978-09-27 The unraveling of Helen O

Wednesday, September 27th, 1978

What is all this to me?
What am I supposed to see … to learn here?
That I loved someone, briefly …
and then watched her unravel
and sift away like sand?

Manic/depressive …
driven to the ends of her personality
and unable to make a stand.

Are we, then, no more than our personality patterns?

Is it
that I am to see
that there is no deeper essence
beneath the things we believe we are?

Is she, then, all of her, gone
when she disassembles?

Am I to disbelieve in spirit
when I cannot find hers?

A combination of intelligence
and an over-driven nervous system;
some parts striving, some parts of
ego, caring, memories, presence…
and beauty….

Some parts terror and vanity, courage and cowardice…
and hurt….

A form with too much energy to maintain itself
against the entropy we call insanity.

She has crossed the barrier again.
And much like the child’s tale of frosty the snowman …
we dare not love her too long.

gallagher
27 september 78

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

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1978-09-27

Wednesday, September 27th, 1978 

   There must be reasons, I know, for this miserable play
   that I should have loved her… to see her taken away.
   Her promises, much brighter than most,
   now lie abandoned by their delirious host.
   She had possessions and a mind of razored fire
   and, when she could hold it, compassion and fine desire.
   I know its for something, that its all come down this way.
   Am I to learn understanding of it or to have the sense to step away?
   It seems the months of this last year
   have been filled with people like me, far too much I fear.
   Kathy’s centered ego, so very much like my own,
   mocks my need to hold her, her mirror brings it home.
   And Helen’s hyper-brightness, her driving needs to win
   lead me to my own belief that less than the best’s a sin.
   Its no chance, these people, more like me than me
   have come to give reflections of the things I never see
   I wane much more sober, beaten back again
   by the difference in the dreams I nurture and the ways reality
   bends.
                              gallagher
                              september 27, 78

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

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