Lou Pugliese’s most recent poem to appear here was “For someone, maybe” (May 2014). 

Please don’t understand
By Lou Pugliese

Perhaps you share my addiction
We’d never speak of it if you did
It’s at peace for me today having been recently fed
It’s diet of rotten flesh and broken dreams

I know: “you’re as sick as your secrets”
I know: “true, noble, real, pure, lovely, admirable, exceptional, and praiseworthy”
The thoughts I should think
But a large ego and a small self-esteem are easy prey

A life well lived is fragilely threatened with self-destruction
When obsessions overpower all intellect
Stealing hours and days of conscious time
As I slide into a lazy indulgence

I really hope you don’t understand a word of this
And I’m the only one
Who is blessed with love, and peace, and contentment, and
A stable equilibrium due to be punctuated with another failure by submission

We aren’t raised to be this weak
We aren’t raised to even know what this is
But somehow that dark cancer emerges inside
With an appetite beyond what it erodes from one’s soul

Some say it’s a sickness
Some say it’s a character flaw
The cure would the same
But the appetite must be sated

Like a dying man on a desert island
You’ll drink the putrid, salty, spoiled water
You’ll eat the unknown fruit and the defecated remains of anonymous origin
And survive anew, willing to die yet satisfied for a time with the foul swill

And then there’s peace and beauty
Having filled your sins with nectar foreign to others
Normal again for a time
Until you are not . . .