Touching me touching you

How affection leaves robin-egg blue
like eyes in each everyday moment of you
when ordinary is grocery-cart pushing
and wishing was then not deciding
if a striped watermelon was really ripe.

Wanting to ask you, and then confusing
the attraction of touching for adoration
in all the weaker parts of me, honestly
still when I close my eyes to wonder
I see that incredible shade of blue


As I remember, your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
~ From: Diamonds & Rust, Joan Baez

* * *

Maybe all those phrases like...

"I'm bored"
"I'm sad"
"I'm sick"
"I'm happy"
"I'm drunk"
"I'm excited"
"I'm well"
"I love"
"I loathe"
"I did"
"I took"
"I think"
"I need"
"I saw"
"I remember"

... run a quicker course and have a greater tendency to become stale. Not that they are bad notions - pas du tout. But maybe if we focus more outside ourselves, we may well find ways to expand our nature. Afterall, our realm seems greatly to be about the world that touches us. So then, maybe 'touching back' is a good thing.

This isn't political advocacy - maybe more like, human or social advocacy.

Self-reference is important but without an enriched (like Wonder Bread building strong bodies 12 ways) relationship to others, it all seems rather empty. It is about touching and that is more than a single-element notion.

I remember that time you told me you said
"Love is touching souls"
~ A Case of You,Joni Mitchell

* *

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing,
laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever
so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that
pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

~I Sing the Body Electric, Walt Whitman