When it’s not Jews, it’s Arabs. If it’s not Muslims, it’s Mexicans. When it’s not Mexicans, it’s Haitians. If it’s not Haitians, it’s Somalis. After Somalis, it will be a new shadow, a new name, a new narrative, but the same fear.
Someone is always the other. The “uncivilized” is always to blame. Fear changes faces: geography, location, cultural identity, but never leaves the room.
When we see ourselves in them, when empathy comes first, until love triumphs over the face of evil, when repentance breaks us, until reconciliation rises over division, until we recognize our humanity in others, until we see the face of God in their experience and pain, the next scapegoat waits. The cycle of violence and dehumanization never ends.
I searched for you in places I never expected love to live. I dreamed of you before I ever knew your face, or delighted in your smile.
I kissed your lips a thousand times before I knew their shape, loved you before our lives ever crossed.
Even now, I do not know whether I will meet you in the world of flesh, for my love has lived wrapped in a dream: a dream that could become real only if you chose to be visible, only if your presence drew near.
I have heard you are going away, to a distant land— whether by choice or by fate, I do not know, but I still care.
My mind unraveled when news reached me that you would go. Though I never touched your face, never held you, never learned the scent of your body, I lost all sense of direction when I read the words of your leaving, as if half my heart were displaced, cut clean into two inseparable pieces. I cried into the night and counted too many sleepless hours.
Still, I will search for you: in dreams, and, if I must, in the waking world, until I find you, where two hearts may merge as one.
And when I do, I will not turn away again, for then we will affirm what has always been true: that I am yours, and you are with me.
My love for you was never perfect, but it was deep and sincere. I knew I was not meant to fall in love with you, yet I did. I could have chosen others to share my love with, but I chose you because I wanted you to feel loved, to know care, and to carry some trace of my life within yours.
I loved you gently, and I loved you passionately. I loved all of you, even what was imperfect. Though I knew we were different, but I still chose you. You were my choice, again and again.
Now, as I let you go, I hope you remember what we shared. I made you my priority, often even above myself, my desires, and my ambitions. What I gave you, I gave freely, and I will do it again and again.
I hope you find the happiness, and the life I could not give you. If life ever casts you aside or tries to wrap you in shame, I hope you find someone who will love you even more than I did, think of you more than I could, carry your heart more carefully than I ever managed. I hope you he will treat you with greater gentleness and kindness than I was able to give.
I am writing this last poem to tell you how I have loved you, to give shape to my devotion, to name what I was willing to give: the truth of my love, sincere and real.
I am writing this last poem to remind you how I chose you, and where I stop, not the end of loving you, but the moment I choose to release you, without saying goodbye.
I let you go, painfully, into a kinder life, so you may know a more beautiful love that comes after me.
I love you in secret, slowly, so we may survive the complexity of our story: learning how to move through a love never meant for daylight, a love that must not speak its name in public.
I love you with caution, as if loving you were a crime, a hidden sin, as if this tenderness, once exposed, could undo our very existence. It is a love shaped by anxiety, formed in the quiet spaces that made us.
I love you in silence, to protect the depth of what we share. I love you where my heart speaks in a language only you understand, where only your soul can hear its trembling sound.
Perhaps our love is real only there: in disguise, in distance, in secrecy— far from the pain it costs us, where our souls can finally rest in the simple thought of us. Where the heart is allowed to feel, but not act, not reveal. This is the mercy of loving you.
I love you from a distance, because distance is preservation. It aches us both, yet it is how I keep you safe: this sunlight we were never meant to touch.
You were my sunlight on bare skin. I was the warmth that made you glow. It is a love without witness, distance transformed into mutual devotion.
She whispers into my ear, revealing love’s quiet secret: happiness lives in a smile.
She leans toward me, desiring my peace, my assurance, resting her head against my chest: waiting, breathing in slow motion, as if my heart itself must learn how to curve into joy, her delight the soft seduction of love.
I feel it rise slowly, that gentle awakening, a smile forming not just on my lips but in the quiet spaces between us, where breath meets breath and longing softens into warm embrace .
A smile, I say to her, is an eternal gesture of bliss, of desire, of memory being born in the fragile now.
A smile has a soul, she whispers. It dwells at the edge where love and happiness speak in silence, where tenderness becomes knowing, where intimacy is the quiet secret of commitment.
My second poem of January unfolds as a narrative of emotional exposure: raw, unguarded, and aching. It speaks to the quiet devastation of loving deeply while remaining unloved. The speaker stands as a witness to a fragile relationship he labored to nurture and protect, only to lose both the beloved and the love he poured into her.
“Notes from a Fragile Love”
I let you go because the tenderness I offered was never returned. The passion I carried became too heavy to hold alone.
When I told you I missed you, you turned away, as if longing were a foreign language you refused to learn.
When I reached out for comfort, you said, “You’re a man; deal with it.” In that moment, you taught me that vulnerability had no shelter with you. You wanted emotional connection in theory, but when it was mine, it became inconvenient.
You wanted to hold my hand in public: not for love, not for passion, but to be seen, to borrow visibility without commitment. You wanted the appearance of us, not the responsibility.
You rationed the words “I love you,” as if they were scarce. I gave them freely, infinitely, to seal your heart and mine. You wanted us hidden when it mattered, a secret folded into convenience. I wanted love that could stand in the light.
I carried your words inside me like scripture; you erased mine as if they never mattered. I remembered your heartbreak line by line, while you put on earbuds to silence mine.
I treasured your moans during lovemaking, the way your body spoke trust intimacy desire connection yet in motion, you called his name, and I learned my presence was never singular.
When I spoke of a future with you, you said you weren’t ready. When I imagined a child, a son bearing both our names.
You laughed, and my hope became a joke.
That is when I understood: I was listening with my whole soul to someone who had already tuned me out.
And that is why I let you go. Not because I stopped loving you, but because I finally loved myself enough to stop offering intimacy where it could not rest.
Drops of tender tears, fall silently on staring nights. Bed sheets hold the weight of unforgettable tears, each one a whisper of you.
Memories that once were near have become the enemy of the heart. Familial places turn into sites of alienation. Even the smiles of joy transform into moments of sadness, haunting the quiet spaces where I once felt your presence.
Yet silence seals my lips, and words die in the shadow of longing, unspoken, carried only by the tears of the night that fall on the moon.
I long to speak to you, to feel your presence near, to look at you, but silence blocks my words My heart lost its way.
I dream of you, and woke up empty. Loliness walks beside me now, the night reminds me of pain & tears: faithful, uninvited, my only companion. But it is you I wait for.
Most of us do not know how to live. Untrained in the art of the good life, we move forward by learning how to endure the circumstances that shape and constrain us.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” —Oscar Wilde
drcelucienjoseph, "Thinking and Meditating" 