Home » 2019 (Page 27)
I look at you
like an old friend
someone I haven’t talked to in a while
and with enough time together
you find it odd
how good it feels
to speak again, and again
in the morning and at night
I’m the lull of mid afternoon
taking pieces of my certainty that aren’t yours to have
leading me to remember, why
we stopped speaking
in the first place.
Though you know I’ll listen when you call.
I couldn’t be that cruel.
Next
to the Bible
in the Dollar Store
I pick up
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
tuck it
under my arm
and proceed to the cashier,
handing her a buck
she looks at me warmly
and says,
this is a good one, but
young man, have you read the Holy Bible?
Watch your soul.
I’d say tongue but I don’t harbor
the arrogance I once spewed.
Give me a break, like I dealt it
in cards, knowing you’d take the Ace.
I am only human, I have no other excuse.
I was scared of losing, most of all I was terrified that I could choose.
Does it feel good to see through me
like spotted glass, knowing your
windows are clean?
And why do I bother to even ask? It’s not you who hold the answer, I can see, it’s I who has stood
idle, waiting to turn the key.
So if you’re looking through the peephole, please don’t make a sound.
I can see your shadow quiver, mine quivers there too.
But I can’t turn that key with a lock full of gum.
Another way out then, ah, hum — there’s a pauper selling candy, eating pizza on 68th next to Sole — so I’m pretty sure we’ll meet again, like heroine and Burroughs.
Neither one asks for it.
It’s something that develops over time.
Neither asks questions, either
when honesty is speaking.
Did you burn yourself out
like a flame wick under wax?
Or were you just here for the holiday?
Is that why you smelled vanilla?
I don’t have a match that’s long enough
to strike you from this far,
with another year upon us.
I just kind of smelled your dying.
procrastination is an easy pill to swallow
in the sense that one day
there won’t be any left to take
and tomorrow won’t ask anything of you
so in a morbid sense you’ve won,
or is it the other way around?
Her beauty was ultimately marred
by my incessant need for her beauty.
I wished to tell her she need not try so hard,
though knew this to be, ultimately futile.
I even coaxed her with a juicy red apple once,
just to slow her down.
But she explained fairly how she didn’t like apples,
or huntsman, but preferred mirrors
because they spoke to her in words
that were not forced but honest.
She looked at me and asked, is it so hard for a frog to see her beauty could never have the power to transform anything more than its own fading?
And that no kiss could stop time,
that fairy tales are real, but only the Grimm ones.
Let me show you, she said, and taking my lips in hers, sweet like berries
I watched her turn to dust through the stained glass light of morning.
One day you will wake up
to find yourself very successful
or very much alone.
If you are lucky enough
you might even wake to both.
Whom ever is next to you on that day
try your best not to create
a fiction to deny your current state,
and choose wisely your diction
each time you fall back to sleep.
Do not make this common mistake,
going to sleep as means to dream.
Rather wake up knowing love and pain
can not survive without the other.
some
are on a quest
to disappear.
no matter
how high you climb
or help them,
they will one day rise
past the clouds
and dissipate
into the ether —
as a mother weeps
cradling her newborn.
Love is not
holding someone back
Love is helping them
get to where they want to go.
So if it seems your Love is gone,
take comfort in that
Love is sacrifice.
Love is sacred.
Love is not holding yourself back
for love.
It is not a cage, nor game to conquer.
Love is to be shared.
Bukowski said, “love is a dog from hell.”
Someone else said love is kind.
Another, love is blind.
Love is giving her their chance
Love is taking mine.
Words Of An Average White Male 