We are lonely. We must not say so. For me this loneliness stems from boyhood, a shadowy and stark calendar of disability solitudes. Sometimes, even in the midst of people I’m so alone I ache. I also inflate balloons, throw voices, make up songs that only the most deliberate and obstinate children could enjoy. And so oddly, by the age of ten, I was good at collecting children in laughing clusters.
Remember when we put mother’s shorts on the dog? When we tied a string to a wallet, hid in shrubs, and fished for priests? That was some good fishing! (Old priest bends to wallet, wallet jumps, priest follows with a wondrous hopping waddle, a movement never before seen in nature.)
In general I prefer the poets of loneliness. Their ranks include Cesar Vallejo, Osip Mandelstam, Auden, Dickinson, Trakl, Bly, Harry Martinson, and Pablo Neruda. There are so many more. Yannis Ritsos, Cavafy, Richard Hugo, Lorca, James Wright.
I’m laughing, high in the branch of a cherry tree, the bird beside me named Diderot. We shall die eating cherries and converse meantime in separate languages.
Posted with Blogsy
Planet of the Blind 
This speaks to me. I am lonely, as well, and wonder if it’s because of disability – my daughter’s and her ineffable influence on my life.
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