A poem I stumbled across in a coffee shop.

How I managed to copy this entire poem down and still forget the name of the author I will never know. All I want is to find more poetry by this man who can communicate with such piercing honesty an experience that resonates with me in a way I can't describe.

On Love and Loneliness

I have walked down enough silent streets,

Lost in the shadows of my own consciousness,

Afraid to love lest I lose the fantasies

that never really came true,

Afraid to surrender lest I lose some control

that I never really wanted,

Glancing from left to right in hope that joy

and freedom would envelop me.

Loneliness became a gradual companion

when I had not really known him before

And choice terrified me lest I be

only like everyone else,

Which in truth was all I ever wanted to be.

To be myself should be nourishment enough,

according to the wise and self-contained,

But for me it never seemed so from childhood.

Neither was admiration or the embrace

of loving strangers.

It was not beauty I sought,

in some current cultural vogue,

But a heart which touched mine, captured mine,

clung to mine at its very core and drew me

as powerfully to love in turn.

Forever it seems I sought one to love

without a backlog of private hurt and pain.

Without the invading fog that would somehow

mar our love and make it human.

Such never came and I searched the books

that told me what rightfully should be mine.

As the time passed I feared I might not love at all.

And the nourishment not given in childhood

might be lost forever.

When I did not want to live without such love and

seemed incapable of enduring the pain others

silently bear,

I traded loneliness for love, fragile, feeble, afraid,

But locked in my will and my heart:

to see as well as to be seen,

to listen as well as to be heard.

Love was not what I had been told or

what others projected upon me,

But my private gift which promised

to grow every day,

And slowly the loneliness lifted

beyond anything money or power could buy.

Now I am a man among men, loving

far more rationally and willfully

than I knew could exist,

In the massive, enduring, most significant

struggle of all,

that of loneliness and love.

-author i wish i knew