Keeping Company

While Autumn air pinched us with frost,
I told my cousin of my girlfriend.
She was a different breed:
one on whom I could depend.
She had the love I need.

Where leaves descend to die,
my cousin and I,
shared in tales of women,
with beer-wet lips.

I said how she was loyal.
He said how his was faithful and each of us thought in silence.
Those moments, for which I'm grateful,
crystallize as powdery dew on bark's dark side,
in a mind grey with age.

My girl was too shy to display her love publicly.
It was something too personal to bare before any witness but me.
Less joy I had known, less warmth I could conceive, 'fore her's was shown.
Hands worn from a day's chopping, muscles torn, she massaged the weariness away.
My body barely settled in its' chair before a hot meal was laid there at our table.

His girl was his lap-warmer.
He would fall on his couch from a salesman's day of walking.
Then his boots were gone and her arms encircled his shoulders.
She'd hear his jokes and they'd share a laugh.
He loved to light candles and join her bubble bath.

The wind pressed us, trying to enter our thoughts.
We enjoyed recalled feelings for a while more.
Finally we rejoined everyone.

Blahg

Sludge. Each sort of person encounters another intolerable, unpreferable, better off dead. A type of criminal is probably among your examples. Fundamental beliefs becoming discardable w/in men takes years of grafting, new ideas scaffolding, the scaffold enfolded turns to a network, the extension is so large the whole man's center of gravity shifts away from the principle which was the core years ago and is an extraneous protrusion (in the context of how) the resettled self now sits, laying on precepts more recently internalized. Each of us is successful in a way, self-fulfilling prophecies, never having all we want, equalized by death, illness, weakness, forgetfulness, the foibles of transitive nature. A man who has much still wants more and has less. A man who has little still enjoys himself. Is not the suffering a pleasure-sweetener? Don't the contrasts of long periods of pain's dormancy make the man bathed in pleasure for years all the worse those times he's discomforted? One man drools over his pokemon cards, another plots continental control, he's relieved to be stoned enough the divorce's off his mind, this guy worries about his daughter, she's late for meeting a friend -lost in dancing, etc. Our lives blend together in a mire, none spectacular, none so terrible. Aren't lies the most efficient motivation? Instead of needing to prove thyself true by a measure the listener must adopt if he's to agree the speaker can appeal to what the hearer already finds tasty and so have a better likelihood of persuasion. You can't convince a man a=a, when he has spent 60 years believing a='whatever the majority says it is', in time to get the help you need. Swindlers...aren't they heroes? Why fight a man, interfacing w/his body, beating him into submission, if you can hijack his brain w/some catchphrases?