wordsmith, singer, writer, & editor
I feel like I’ve been split in two
then three
then four,
I think of you
then split some more
I tell myself it’ll be all right,
but then I start to split in five
and have to find my pieces spread
across your floor,
across my bed
and take my heart
that’s shattered so
and teach it how
to let you go.
I already know it’s over,
because it never began.
I understand
that everything I felt
was slap-dashed together in my head,
even if you said the right things
and told me what I needed to hear in that moment,
since you were clear
and everything that came after
was just theater
in the form of comfort
and what I thought might be
love in its infancy.
I wish you could see,
feel
what those consequences are,
of building someone up to a precipice
then pushing them over
because it’s so easy for you
to push.
I don’t want to be a cushion.
I don’t want to be a blanket.
I don’t want to be less than,
smaller than,
easy to discard.
I really thought it would be harder
to let me go,
and deep down I knew,
I still know,
that it’s not about me,
and never was.
It’s really easy to write about love. It connects so deeply with all of us; it’s a feeling we understand and can never understand. It’s complicated and filled with uncertainties. And we’re so deeply set in our ways and our preferences and our passions that sometimes we miss out on the greatest of loves. Sometimes we forget to love our families, our friends, our selves. Sometimes we think we matter to someone. Sometimes we don’t matter one bit, and realize it too late. Sometimes we don’t know we’re in love. Sometimes we think we loved, when we never did; it just seemed like love at the time, and that’s how we remembered it. Sometimes we love someone like family. Sometimes we’re in denial that what we’re feeling is actually love. We wonder if they think of us. We wonder about them often, more than we should. We’re tricked by lust or obsession or envy and masking it as love. We’re telling someone we love them because it gets us something. We’re saying we love, when we know it’s not real. We’re loving based on one facet of a person, instead of the whole of them. We’re using love as an excuse to stay. We’re letting the one that got away, get away. We’re loving only when it’s convenient, or starting to admit we are. When they leave, we don’t actually miss them. We’re not letting new love in. We’re avoiding feeling. We’re lying to avoid love.
Which is why it’s so easy to write about. Simply because it’s so hard to explain, to experience in one way. We write and we question and we wonder—what kind of love has taken place? And how has that love changed me?
This poem is about one of those kinds of loves. The one that never happened:
Strangers
We’ve never met.
We have, but not really.
Sure, we’ve talked:
we’ve shared our fears,
our life stories,
our anxieties,
our goals,
our ambitions,
our hates,
our humor,
our history,
maybe even intertwined souls at some point,
but we’ve never met.
You don’t know me
because you’ve never asked.
It’s easier to maintain distance,
even when you’re so close,
I can feel your breath on my back,
your words in whispers down the nape of a neck
that never had to be mine.
We’ve never met,
and in never meeting, we could never fall in love.
You’ve made sure of that,
as have I,
and my past experiences have guaranteed
that this lack of meeting would never be one-sided,
my heart never misguided
because I never let you let me in.
We’ve never met.
And from what you’ve told me
I don’t know if we should ever meet.
I’d rather spend my life never knowing who you are,
than to fall in love with the idea of us,
of what we could be,
and yet,
sometimes I have to tell myself I’m being silly,
that meeting you is no more dangerous
than meeting a stranger
that you’ve bumped into in passing on the sidewalk.
“Excuse me.”
“No, excuse me.”
And you part ways, the exchange and the meeting lasting only a moment—
and you never see them again.
When you live in the city
the lights are like mid-sky stars—
bright, blinking, full of color:
the reds of brake lights and streetlights
that breathe pauses into the night;
the soft yellow of lamps dotting downtown roads;
the white beam shining from the top of a crane like a lighthouse,
that if you look long enough
starts to mimic the North Star before you realize you should close your eyes
tight, tight, tight
that light,
you know it.
It turns the black sky gray,
hides the constellations in its glow,
pretends to keep them safe,
when really,
it’s just trying to outshine nature.
It’s human nature
to be unnatural,
to seek comfort in the made,
instead of grown,
to find a room of one’s own
and destroy the house
made of sticks and palm leaves and dirt
that had been provided for you
since what feels like the beginning
of everything.
We’ve added more artificial light,
that we keep in our pockets,
or hold in our hands
like we’re holding the sun,
a world of instant gratification
translated to fun
translated to unsocial interaction.
I don’t think anyone feels that sense
of satisfaction
now that culture is in comparison,
a sin for which I’m guilty.
But when you live in the city,
the lights are beacons of connection,
our phones, little galaxies of light,
that add themselves to these buildings
that seem to touch the sky with unseen fingertips,
resting on the body of the night.
I’ve had my moments of dishonesty,
but honestly
at that point I was so unhappy
you could wrap it in your hand
and the sadness would slide and seek,
bite down with teeth
into the soft blue of the veins beneath
your wrist.
Make a fist, honey,
and release—
let the blood flow openly
like your door flew open
and let her in
so quick,
your heart thick
with lust and darker things…
But I’ll tell you the consequence that rushing brings:
you do not know her.
She’ll eat you alive,
she’ll roast you at 400 degrees,
20 to 30 minutes in that heat
until you give her all of you
so she can feast
on what’s made you soft,
then chew on your bones
like she’s one of those dogs you love.
I hope she doesn’t hurt you,
but she will.
Girls like her, they get a thrill
from pounds of flesh
they pull from far beneath your chest
in the caverns of a place
where you once loved me.
You’ve probably learned to forget
what made us break:
your first mistake,
to be made more of skeleton
than heart.
You made the concept of dishonesty
an art,
then pretended it was me
who killed us.
Have you ever rested on a pillow
and wondered
whose head has rested there before?
Whose strands of blonde hair are caught
in the side zipper?
Whose body wrapped around it,
a snuggled head,
a little bit of drool,
the remnants of foolish love,
of heartbreak,
of her home before she knew him?
She left that pillow for you,
so you could rest your head
on what’s left of her,
a piece of
false comfort,
a pillow she used to love,
before time wore it into
faded fabric, unwashed,
the scent of her so intertwined in thread—
you couldn’t even tell
she had been there.
I’m not usually this quiet,
but I have to be,
because what I say:
won’t help
won’t sway
won’t make you stay—
won’t change the way you feel.
Can we be real?
It hurts to kiss you,
to miss you,
pricking myself
on the spines that stick from your tongue,
protruding like a badge of honor for the young
needing a method to protect themselves
from the truth
that they’re made of 90 percent water,
10 percent hot air,
without a care
that anything they once felt
won’t start growing again
until summer.
What a bummer,
to always be the one who breaks first
who makes the worst habit
of filling the little voids
with words that you might consider
a desperate attempt
at building an oasis
that’s easy for the both of us to find.
I am your pincushion,
your words, the pins,
your flowers show brightly in the sun
blossoming despite the lack
of hydration
because you were prepared for this.
My mouth.
My mouth was once a cactus
that grew before it could store enough water
to survive the heat.
Now my mouth is a syllabic desert;
your mouth,
the cactus filled with the linguistic equivalence
of water,
the likes of which
would save us both.
I think my heart can see the future
one pang for yes,
two pangs for no
three pangs for try again later
or maybe
or…
I wish you could feel
this little ball that sits in the middle of my chest
and expands
and contracts
and expands,
and keeps expanding
when I think of the way
you’ve made me feel
up until…
I have these words I want to say
but don’t quite know how to say them
because saying them
would be admitting
that I’m the only one
who feels them
and admitting that would be…
if we could go back in time,
three pangs,
two pangs,
one,
expansion,
contraction,
smaller,
until it almost doesn’t exist,
almost doesn’t…
it will always hurt
to know you are worth
less than a potential future
because distance is a scary place
where you would never venture,
two pangs,
two pangs,
two pangs,
expansion,
contraction,
heartbreak,
but not really breaking,
so much as opening up
an old wound,
that never had time to heal—
more a crack that expands
in a crystal ball heart,
spiderwebs of glass,
without shatter,
a heart too broken
to be optimistic
about the future.
So while trying to complete the following prompts (this is the last of them!), my Internet decided to reset. So you’re seeing a second version, an attempt at remembering. Changed just a touch from original intent. Either way, the original version was equally short. I decided that these poems were more appropriate as snapshots, to oppose the seemingly vast natures of their topics.
The title of each poem will be shown as it was written on Facebook. And beneath it the first name and last initial of whoever presented it.
How Will 2017 Be Remembered in History
Yosi M.
Was there a year
that existed between 2016 and 2018?
I can’t remember…
violence has erased memory,
the rest washed away with the King tide.
the eventual heat death of the universe
Padrick B.
We will not burn
in sun-fire,
we’ll freeze,
motion dissipating,
the universe anticipating a state
of unpleasant equilibrium,
a macrocosm
of that game among children,
where they’ve touched you
and you’ve turned to stone.
My ex stole my dog and now I hope he dies so I can get my dog back
Rebecca F.
I didn’t know when you took him
that I had anything left to take
but barkless nights can make
the loneliest of evenings expand
into an unending feeling
of walklessness.
Goodbye Summer
Jayson T.
I have nothing left to say to you,
really,
nothing.
You got away with it,
at least in the sense,
that you no longer feel
an obligation to be human,
providing closure in the coldest
of shoulders,
more ice
than flesh
and bone.
The title of each poem will be shown as it was written on Facebook. And beneath it the first name and last initial of whoever presented it.
The significance of colors
Nikki B.
I feel red,
then orange,
then the lightest shade
of pink
sometimes I think
I am rainbow
prism or prisoner
of clearly defined hues
masking themselves
as expectations:
you are blue,
and green,
and purple.
No.
I am sunset,
hope, passion, fire.
I am Prometheus
human-bound
then bound for all eternity.
I am
summer’s day
the way you look in the morning
when light hits your face
just so
I want you to know
you are opal,
sapphire,
gem,
not quite one of them,
but you reflect
one color, then many—
your eyes,
emerald then golden
depending on the way you tilt your head
dreams of terra-cotta skin
if you stay outside
just a little bit longer
I want to be every color imaginable
When we speak, it is in CMYK
we exchange words in tinted syllables,
my skin is opaque peach,
my eyes, undecided
my face turns a darker shade of red under the following conditions:
embarrassment,
love,
anger,
glances across a room,
and when you break my heart,
I know the shade I’ll be:
colorless
and you,
you will become transparent.
The Cassini space probe!
Bryan L.
I seek you out in cold dark
god of plenty, of agriculture,
magnetic field
of Cassini dreams
I dive between the spaces of your rings,
to understand
your moons and limbs
and universe.
A description of the sound that Mouse feet make when they run.
Rio C.
Rice dropped onto a wooden floor
Light tapping of long fingernails
What I imagine the word “scatter” sounds like
Tiny representations of anxiousness
A miniature Morse code machine calling for help
Why you asking people to do the hard part for you?
Benjamin S.
Difficult
is stepping from the pillow of your comfort zone
and diving
into a hole
that could be filled
with knives,
rocks,
or more pillows.
