On Heartbreak: The Beautiful Half of a Golden Hurt

Heartbreak, man. That’s what I want to write about. Used to be I couldn’t write truthfully unless I was heartbroken. Libations helped, too. My primary image as a child was lovesickness. My mother’s estranged lover, Tomas, lived across from our building at the UPACA Houses in East Harlem. The buildings in the UPACA, separated by a courtyard, were identical: dull project brick, window guards, glass that grew cumulus with soot. In our place, my mother usually set the stage for heartbreak with dim lights, elbows on the windowsill, plumes of cigarette smoke, maybe a sip of Bacardí Light, and Al Green’s Call Me on a loop. My mother and Tomas watched each other from their third-floor apartments, a strange and cruel fate. I imagined they communicated telepathically, trying to read each other’s sadness, asking each other why?

After my mother’s death, I discovered a few of her journals, a Teddy Pendergrass album with a dedication written by Tomas in ragged cursive, and pictures of her and her ex-boyfriends. My mother’s journals were filled with details from her monthly visits to her primary doctor, her grandchildren’s birth mementos, and the occasional quote from a movie like Love Story or her favorite line from Mahogany: “Let me tell you something, and don’t you ever forget it: success is nothing without someone you love to share it with.” For her, documentation was necessary to parse heartbreak.

In my twenties, I managed heartbreak in a less curated way. I numbed myself, drenched the feeling with high-proof alcohol, narcotized my memory with endless bouts of dragon chasing. I was unversed in cures for love. No therapy, no support groups, just a snort here, a puff there, that would remind me I once knew sublime happiness. Once, a woman—let’s call her Lea—who broke my heart in perfect halves asked if I wrote any poems for her. I didn’t. God knows I had more than enough inspiration. I could have painted a portrait of how Lea’s eyes closed after kissing, or the sharp inquiries of her twisted lips, or her finger-waved hair, the flutter of her sable eyelids, her eyes that morphed from assessment to flirtation.

Because Lea lived near the Hudson River, my boy Tito, who shared in my self-destruction, would ask, “What’s up with Hudson River?” In the interest of self-preservation, Hudson River could not hang with my dissipation, I thought. But she tried. Four times, in fact, and four times I went back to the same misguided belief that I had to live broken to write broken truthfully. Almost a month after Lea asked me if I dedicated a poem to her, we broke up for the fourth and final time, and I couldn’t stop writing about her, for her, to her, which is to say that after the vomiting, loss of appetite, sleepless nights, and clouded thinking, all I had was language, the heart’s language for a singular love.

As a young poet, I saw the world. I mean, I already knew the world could be found on any street corner in my East Harlem neighborhood, but I started putting actual mileage on my shoes. I discovered that in some places, the words love and heartbreak do not exist. There is no language for romance or regret. On one tour to London almost twenty-five years ago, on the heels of that breakup with Lea, I sought diversion, a different kind of distraction, mostly by walking through the streets. Before tours, I made mixtapes to play on my Walkman. For London, it was a compilation of Tito Rojas hits. Rojas was a social club standout, and one of my mother’s favorites. Tropical salsa as a genre should be called Hallmark Latin Groove because most of the songs are about love lost, regained, broken, unrequited, cheated, betrayed, and the big payback. I listened to that tape for a good part of my day before I ripped the mic. In fact, I could be heard in my hotel room singing to Rojas’s songs, “Ayer me dijeron/Que de vez en cuando/Preguntas por mí.”

I tried with all my might to sing Lea out of my system. After thirty days of Rojas, and varying modes of seduction on the road, I thought I was cured, but I was in a rush to get back to the States, a rush to get back to that feeling, that forever note. But you never move on from heartbreak. The first heartbreak sets the bar for who you can trust, how much of yourself you can share, your ability to be honest. My mentor, a renowned blues poet, died of heart failure six months after his wife died. It’s true, man, more die of heartbreak than cancer. With Lea, I shattered my own heart’s potential to find a perfect harmony, but I wondered about the loves that remain with you when you’re sinking, that never give up throwing you a life saver, the Veras to the Vladimirs.

This essay might double as a craft talk on how to write a love poem. If you know your Gwendolyn Brooks, then you know the title is borrowed from her poem “To Be in Love.” I use this poem as a model for a definition poem. (Gil Scott-Heron used to say that poetry aims toward definition. What we lack in everyday language, only poetry can provide.) I refer to Brooks’s poem when I need to understand the twirling effects of love, as when she writes, “And you are free/With a ghastly freedom./You are the beautiful half/Of a golden hurt.” Good love poems speak to a deeper, decolonized aesthetic whereby a poet’s process is one of putting pieces together after being disembodied—those shards of vase that Derek Walcott talks about in his Nobel Prize lecture. I write in slivers and chips, but on occasion an obelisk presents itself with an undeniable demand for attention.

I’ve heard it said that if poets are not writing about death, they’re not writing about anything; the same could be said for love. Back on the block, if a homie saw that you were in love, they would say, “You open, bro.” That was a phrase I heard years before I encountered Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal,” in which she writes, “Love is a word another kind of open—.” Heartbreak leaves you open, receptive, and unawares when the real thing walks through the door. Poetry helped me understand that death makes you pay a tax, but love is always there to collect.