Reading Hemingway

"Hemingway handed me a heavy heart, dressed in an optimistic title"

The first time I read Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises”

Every page seemed like an addition of an addiction,

To adrenaline and affairs,

And pretending not to see love-

as it sits beside you-

Too boring, perhaps;

Or maybe too hopeful.

Hemingway handed me a heavy heart,

Dressed in an optimistic title.

Tomorrow might start itself up,

And pass itself along through each season,

But nothing will ever change.

The sun also rises-

It’s just another observation that the lost and lonely make;

Said out loud to solidify the hope that we can try again- tomorrow.

Hemingway did not tap lightly in his inking of real loss in an unfocused time.

He could not have known how lost some of us are now;

Although his titled hope for a new day never made contact with his own over-dressed darlings,

Maybe the shadow of sorrow’s sentiment sewn into each sentence

Was the signature of his own kind of lonely;

The one only cured by his bedside bottle.

Inside characters carrying weight-of-the-world hearts; engaging in casual, wealthy conversations scrawled all over those pages-

Meaning to mean nothing and nothing repeated-

Maybe Hemingway found the real depth in the bottom of his thirst.

The sun also rises:

I wear his words like a badge of belief;

Still wondering if he saw certainty of sunrise with the same damned optimism,

Or just scrawled a title; something summoned by the softness of hard spirits.

Choked as he emptied his tumbler,

With cynicism, with satire;

The knowledge that the lost and those who have lost will believe dawn can be different in redemption,

When all the sunrise signifies is a life of Sisyphus;

Where time moves mountains, and money, and maturation.

And you,

You do not move at all.

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