I let them. When they let me let them.

*

Tonight I'm listening to sad songs. And happy songs that are happy because they are disguising their sadness.

I understand this, and so do you, I bet.

I can't figure out if I'm listening to help the tears or prevent them.
It's a convoluted mess, distinguishing between emotions.

It's like trying to recognize your face after you've been (temporarily, if only slightly) changed.
Like seeing a picture of yourself from the back when you didn't know one had been taken.

(original film photo: May 2013; handmade manipulation to the physical print: today)

Here's what Brooks Haxton (who comforts me with his directness) 

writes in his poem I Am from his collection Uproar:

The fog I call the world is not a cloud of atoms

only, but a cloud of feelings, and ideas. I mind

my little bumps. I grieve. I think about non-being.

All I do is what my flesh can do, yet everything

my flesh can do feels strange [...]

[...] I taste damp sparks inside my tongue. If sayings 

gather under the name of Faith, or Art, I let them

when they let me let them, and my mind clears.