The Art of Loneliness

Not just a practical art
but one for beauty
and transfiguration.

Loneliness is an accomplishment.
Cherries picked and pocketed.
Walking in the rain.

Yet so many with cell phones,
With children and their happy ruckus.
Societal pressures to volunteer,
to ask your Doctor after each
endlessly repeated advertisement.
Where is the time
to be truly lonely?

And yet it happens
in the midst of these commitments
and deadlines. No matter how many
mosquitoes on the pond.

When one is startled
by that empty, unspecified hollow
somewhere between heart and lungs.
Leave the umbrella at home
when walking in the rain

Lonely lets you know
you’re real.
Sounds are turned off.

Well attended conversations
become indistinct
and familiar faces
recede to the background.
All that is unacknowledged
space around you.

Now, quick ! Carpe momenti !
Bring on the Sleeping Gypsy.
The curious cat hovering
over a brightly cloaked dreamer
with moon ascending from his guitar
in some lonesome desert.

L. Fullington

The illustration is Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau

If you've any comments on this poem, L. Fullington would be pleased to hear from you.