Skip to main content

When I Fall In Love Again (Note to Self)

by Paul Tumey


Give her a break.
She’s probably as scared
as you are.
While you are in love
don’t forget
to ask who made that juniper bush
that grows 
out of a canyon wall
like a baby 
carried on its mother.

While you are falling
ignore the parachute
fly through the sky 
watch the sun melting
stand on a desert dune and witness
the universe contract into nothingness
as it tends to do.
Notice the space

between the stars
the space
between you and her 
that is what’s good.

You will find 
the way she sleeps into you
like a rock hugged
by a waterfall
or a juniper bush
tucked
into a warm and safe place
Brings tears
big wet wonderful surging
that blur your vision.
Wipe them away
to water the plantings
And be ready to see their
tender green leaves unfolding
They need you to see them

Do not be afraid of the good moments with her.
If you don’t want to
you will not have to
let them come back and haunt you.

Hold this slowly dying candle to the window
when night is outside
and the dark is switched on
look with your eyes
see with your heart
the flame’s reflection
in the cold glass pane.
Twin flames dancing.
When the flames
           see each other
through you
love will have found you 
again.

-March 14, 2011
copyright 2011 Paul Tumey

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Book on Screwball Comics Coming September 2018

My first book, Screwball! The Cartoonists Who Made the Funnies Funny is scheduled for publication in September 2018. The publisher will be The Library of American Comics/IDW. Eisner-Award winner Dean Mullany will design and edit the book, with Bruce Canwell and Lorraine Turner providing their expertise, as well. It will be a large, full-color hardcover art book offering around 275 pages resplendent with rare comics, art, photos and original research. The story of screwball comics in America is a large topic, more sprawling than one book can reasonably encompass if one wishes to present satisfying chunks of reprints. Foo this reason, I decided, after much deliberation, to narrow the focus of this book on American newspaper comics up to about 1950. This means the screwballists who primarily worked in comic books -- Jack Cole, Dick Briefer, Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Al Jaffee -- are saved for, hopefully, another volume. Even with this limitation, it was neces

The Kitchen Notepad Cartoons of 2013

I sing now to you a tale of a family and their doodle-toons. A grubby, stained, mostly used small pad of paper sat by the phone in the kitchen. One day, I drew and colored a cartoon on it, like so: If it looks like the man has his hand in his fly, that's my ineptitude at drawing hands, and is unintentional. Anyway, I found I liked the pad. So I drew a few more cartoons. The little green figures you see in the lower right-hand corner are the vestiges of when the pad was first used by me to make a rudimentary animation flipbook. The next time I picked the kitchen notepad up, I saw that my wife, the artist Claire Mack had added a fantastical drawing: I followed suit with a Groucho mushroom, of course: Claire added a celestial scene: One day, our teen-age daughter, Olivia, added some of her own cartoons: To which, I responded with this very strange fellow, Lemon-Head: The final three pages in the pad are by Claire,

24 Hour Comic from 1989 – The World Seen Through Mr. Foster’s Glasses by Paul Tumey