I Live For Me

I live for me

Individuated, separated

Unburdened by the motions

I live for me

I care for you

And for all

But I will not be so invested

That a mere grimace or scowl

will cause me to fall

I live for me

I will help you see 

the power inside you

But I will not breakdown

Or lose myself 

I live for me

Reviews

[Latifa]

I live for me
I care for you
And for all
I like the cotradiction in these line.
very powerful piece.

[Mike Defreitas]

Yeah. When I wrote this I was trying to reconcile how I have been living in this world, relationally speaking. And how I found myself so subject to external forces i.e other people. How to deal with that reality? It's a contradiction. But it's a contradiction that seems to give meaning to two different ways of being in the world - as a self - and yet a part of something larger. Priority wise: the self is constructed from the inter-relational context. And if you want to get more metaphysical about it, it could be that profound "other" that the self senses when it feels most at one with external realities.

To me, it's a maxim of psychological health: accept the paradox of knowing. We can't hide or dissociate from ourselves the many different contrary and opposed perceptions we have. Of the infinite - or the banal, ordinary, or salacious. Each of these perceptions inhabit a place in our unconscious psyche.

I sense, as a Muslim, you feel this in the spiritual poetry you write. I don't know much about it (rumi, a few books on sufism, Islamic philosophy, and other more specific titles) but I do know that both Shia and Sunni Islam are about the infinite within the finite, the self annihilated in hajj to the source of existence, the kaabah (the probable symbolism, i imagine).

My views are sort of along those lines. I appreciate the psychological - I read alot of relational and interpesonal psychoanalysis, traumatology and cognitive neuroscience - but I'm not personally sold on any particular "theory" for reality. Ultimately, belief is mediated by the perception of how we "feel" about the world. We adopt an orientation without noting it, and, if we aren't mindful of this happening, we can become dogmatic and inflexible about the nature of reality. You can see this belief full-force in so called Islamism - or political Islam. I think, Allah, God, or whomever you believe in, changed the nature of the human condition by exposing us to scientific and psychological realities - forcing an epistemic shift in how we think about the world and ourselves. One INEVITABLE shift is how religions understand themselves. Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, will have to come to a more universalistic perspective which honors and supports difference and wonders about the awesome faculties of the human mind: to chart how we are and act in the world, and to LEARN from our past actions so that we can better ourselves and our species for future. I personally think God factors into that. But not someone else. And I don't think it is logically possible or sociologically healthy to start proseltyizing. But yeah. I do feel God's presence and reality in the sheer facticity of existence. When I see a human cell, and read about the dynamics of gene-protein complementarity, and then think about all the other things I know about the world, the laws of spacetime, the conditions for life, the reason for the shape of a tree or the world of insects. Everything begs the question. I cannot personally understand how someone can't draw the ontological question of: who did this? I get it- yes, the human mind is one - all minds share themselves within a lager cosmos mind - but why this? Why planets, empty space - the laws of quantum physics. You can't erase the ontological force of the "why" for how these things are and what they might possibly mean for us humans - watchers of this mystery we call existence.


Anywho, thanks for the kind review! I think I'll check out more of your work. You touch on a very deep reality in your writings. Of course, with poetry, we never truly understand what we read in the works of others, but the selection of words and the meanings which form still impinge on us strong nonverbal perceptions - telling us that you mean that, or this. When I read your poetry, theres almost an electrical quality to your word selection, almost spastic like, jumping, pulling you into different perceptions, but establishing some general feeling about what your talking about. I think that would be the mark of a good poet?

[Latifa]

I'm so glad you know the Rumi, I wonder if you read the book of "forty rules of love by Elif shafak"
it's a great book that can literally change your perspective and teaches you to never judge a person.

[Mike Defreitas]

I'll look into it. Thanks for the suggestion.