Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator.

An Empty Garlic by Rumi (Translated by Coleman Barks)

"You miss the garden,
because you want a small fig from a random tree,
You don't meet the beautiful woman.
You're joking with an old crone.
It makes me want to cry how she detains you,
stinking mouthed, with a hundred talons,
putting her head over the roof edge to call down,
tasteless fig, fold over fold, empty
as dry-rotten garlic.

"She has you tight by the belt,
even though there's no flower and no milk
inside her body.
Death will open your eyes
to what her face is: leather spine
of a black lizard. No more advice.

"Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love."

What I thought was interesting was that final stanza. "What you really love." not "Who you really love." I began to dwell on who I love, if it's anyone that I know. If it's she, then she has no nourishment and she's deflowered. It is not she. Then I began to think about what I love. And how I love it. I neglect my writing for the fey pressures of life and boredom. I struggle a lot from boredom. And mixing that with a big, empty house, I have nothing to be done. 11 hours a week at my job and I do not love it.

Is the what that I love actually she? Or is the what that ufailing, easy answer. The what is God. But that is too obvious. Writing? Obvious. Film, baseball, theology, rational argument, thinking.

You don't meet the beautiful woman. Not women. Singularly beautiful woman. Not women. And who is she if not she whom I know? Am I too young to know? I mean, the triumverate of potentials that I know don't seem to want me back, and then, if that is the case, is that singly beautiful woman going to never walk into my life because I am too shy?

but what do I love? Silently, quietly, what do I love? Spooning. Oh, it's that easy.

No, no. beyond the jokes, the humor--laughter. I love laughter. I love to laugh. I love music.

Is that what itself my damn-near-hostile obsession with love? Is it all those hopeless romantic thoughts that often decay my mood unto loneliness and bare-boned anonymity?

The what's, the loves, the singulars, and Oh I feel so old.