Category: FB legacy

in the audience

as I watched your set,
I could feel
how my face and eyes and heart and soul
were lit up from within
by how very much
I love you, how much
I need and want you
and I felt that anyone
who glanced at me
even for a moment
would see everything
written on my countenance
because – as I’ve been told
so many times –
I have a glass face. I was glowing
like a candle, like a miniature sun,
quietly burning away
in my little corner of your life.
you might not have seen it –
and I cannot blame you in the slightest,
being that you were pretty busy
expressing your own wonderful art –
but I felt myself shining
like a lighthouse
in the fog. If you’re ever lost
in the dark, I hope you’ll let me
guide your way home
and that I can be that refuge,
that steady burning heartfire
of warmth and light
for you to reheat
your dormant passions
and reignite the pilot light
on the stove within your chest.

my days away from you

I think you don’t quite understand
the strange way
my brain and heart work.
I spend my nights in company –
lately mostly yours, though
not nearly enough
alone time (tête-à-tête, if you will,
and oh, how I would love to)
to satisfy my heart –

and then I go home
alone
to find that one of the cats
has puked on the bed
and there’s only leftovers
to reheat and reluctantly,
eventually eat. I play a sad song
fifty times on repeat, smoke
too many cigarettes,
compose, post and delete three poems,
four selfies, thirteen tweets.

and by the time I lie between
the sheets, my mind
ranges far and wide,
reviewing every moment
every look
every dumb thing
I said and/or did
every friend I insulted or offended,
every other man
I led on and talked to, flirted with
because
I couldn’t bear being
in the same room with you
without being with you,
but especially carefully
I must test the memory
of every accidentally
-on-purpose touch
and imagine the faintest hint
of your response,
seeking to detect the slightest bit
of warmth in your eyes
softness in your voice
electric resonance in your skin.

I feel again all the sensations
and my skin is tingling
as if I’m holding a live wire
but this time I am safe
from myself and from you.
I can’t do anything about these
delicate, intense, intimate
feelings. there’s no danger
that I’ll say something
stupidly real, no risk
of my hand grenade heart
igniting some long-banked
answering fire in you.

eventually I wear myself out.
sleep ambushes me
and I dream fragmented shards
of a mirror world
where we are both brave. waking up
feels like being dragged
up from the bottom
of the ocean; I rush out again
with the tide’s swift and certain need,
drawn by you, my lonely moon,
and by the time I
see you again in the flesh,
I’m so exhausted from all my
solitary imaginings
and agonized reviews
that I can barely hold up my end
of the conversation. I’m sorry.
I’ll try harder to be more present
in your presence
and less intensely tortured
by your absence
when we are apart.

that heart

I’m sorry
I sent you that heart.
not because I didn’t mean it,
but because I do.
I’m so used
to sending them to my girlfriends
and saying I love you
every five minutes
that my fingers just
ran away with me.
these symbols are
so much less freighted
when the love in question
is that of Phileos and Agape.
enter the spectre of Eros
and the whole thing falls apart;
the center cannot hold.

so it’s okay. I understand.
if you’re not ready
to accept my heart,
electronic or otherwise,
feel free
to change the subject.

hangnail

just a tiny piece of flesh;
unwanted, painful, unnecessary.
I kept touching it as if
that would make it go away,
but instead I was only keeping
the agony alive.
if I could just stop
messing with it,
it would have healed itself –
but apparently
I have no willpower.
(like I needed a hangnail
to tell me that.)

finally I realized
that I could easily excise it
with a simple clip, banishing it
to the realm of things that
could no longer hurt me.

you’re like that hangnail.
now that I’ve taken out
the psychic scissors,
the emotional nail clippers,
and surgically removed
your useless remnant
from my heart, the wound
you left behind
can finally begin to heal.

fire/escape

I run away
kind of a lot.
smoking cigarettes
turns out to be a great excuse
to leave wherever I am
at a moment’s notice.

when someone says something
that touches too deep a chord;
when the effort of trying
to make small talk
becomes too much
all of a sudden;
when I can’t control my face
my eyes
my voice;
when I’m beset by
too many feelings,
I find it’s best
to run away.

I’ll even go
around the corner
and hide in a doorway
halfway down the block from the bar
where my friends are,
to be sure I’m alone,
to avoid talking to anyone outside.

a quick cry
a moment of freedom
from holding it all in
can do wonders
to reset my tolerance
for so many people
so much activity
so many thoughts
voices
emotions
energies
rattling around
in such a small space.

my box of Marlboro( Menthol Gold)s
should come with a label
like that on a
fire extinguisher:
“In case of rampant feels,
find a quiet place,
and smoke one to three
as needed.”

if only I could find a way
to preserve my sanity
without destroying my lungs
in the process.

appropriate distance

when we’re out
in public –
whether we arrived together
or just made our separate ways
to the place
where we both
spend most of our time
these days –
I sit close at the slightest opportunity
make every excuse
to touch you –
even just a knee under the table
a hand on your arm
when I’m making a point –
but you,
you keep your distance.

is it because
you want to preserve
that slim buffer of space
between our bodies
to make it obvious
that we’re not an item
so that if a younger, cuter girl
wants to flirt with you, she knows
you’re still available
and that I
have no claim
upon your heart?

or is it because you fear
that once you get too close
we’ll be like magnets;
the pull will be too strong
science will doom us
to be locked together
and you won’t be able
to break free?

or even that you can’t believe
I want to be so close
that I’m doing it on purpose?

I hope it’s one of the latter
but I very much fear
it’s the former.

if only you knew
that your touch
far from repelling me
instead thrills me
comforts me –
warms the very
cockles of my heart, even –
would that change your answer?

over.

if you haven’t noticed
how my feelings have changed
towards you lately,
let me spell it out, make it crystal,
so there can be no mistake.
I no longer love you.

stop talking to me
stop following me
stop projecting your crazy fantasies
of a future that never even
came close to existing
except in your imagination
onto me.
I never wanted that in the first place.
I wanted the one thing
you couldn’t give me:
yourself, in the present.

after all this, I think
you never really cared about me
the way I cared about you.
I at least tried to see you
for who you were.
I wanted to know the real you
as much as you would let me,
which wasn’t very much.

you saw only
what you wanted to believe;
you put your fucked-up shit on me
tried to make me think
that the sky wasn’t blue
up was down
black was white
love was hate
and hate was love.
you are a Minister of Disinformation
and I’m turning off
your propaganda channel,
ripping up the leaflets,
tuning my radio to another, better station.

please feel free to move on
to the next girl
who doesn’t know yet
how unbelievably awful you are.

déténte

we’re locked
in a Mexican stand off,
and no one wants to be
the first one
to put down their gun.

it’s about trust, in the end. do we
trust each other with the ammunition
to destroy each other’s hearts,
or do we swallow these secrets
burning inside our throats
yearning to be free
but terrified of the power
and the endless bragging rights
that the winner will wield over the loser?

it says a lot about the baggage we both carry
from all our previous heartache
that the loser will be the one
who confesses their love first.

I would wish us both free
of this wall of thorns, but
I can’t imagine myself
without my scars,
and I expect you
wouldn’t be the same person either, and
I like you far too much
just the way you are
to sincerely wish you
any other way.

if only we could find a way
out of this maze
without destroying each other
in the process.

tape. glue. gold. (you)

you hold me together.
you paper over the cracks
in my head, in my heart
and keep them
until they can hold by themselves.

when I’m at my most shattered
you pick up the pieces,
carefully reassemble them –
nestling each shard
next to its neighbor,
pressing all the sharp-edged curves
back into place –
until my fault lines are all
filled in with gold.

so after you rescue my broken husk
from the trash heap that I
threw myself on in despair,
I’ll be all the more beautiful
for having been so
utterly destroyed.