Getting Used To Standing Alone

Alone? Your words brush over me like a breeze that makes me aware of the sharpness of my cheekbones. Cutting the air, making it drift across my hair, in streamers of blood-salted sea air. You hold me up as I cough..well, this is awkward. And you say, so let’s be awkward together. Let’s place our barriers close to home. This playground is still open sand where monsters, mice & trolls come to play. Let them dance & befoul. Let them prance & play and fall foul of smiles & threads & word stones. Love, we’ll feast on their carcasses another day.

Hold me in conversation. Your voice is of a stranger pouring familiarities over me, like warm water & honey. My quiet place is a quiet blush & silent thanks for skin so brown it doesnt show. I thought sex was an experience, not an identity. But you and I, when we became you & I, my quiet place became a liquid place. You & I there, fusing, flowing, ebbing. Remember love, this is what it is to create. When you love a poet, this is your fate.

Shall we start? Love among the bookshelves. Dirty talk in literary verse. Turn the fans off so the pages don’t fly. Never let the ink run dry. When it catches & smudges, don’t stop. But we forget you can be passionate without being aggressive. Because a love bite is also a bruise. Forgive yourself for needing some more. Ink is flammable and love, incendiary. Stop glorifying breaking hearts. We’re never going to heal that way. I don’t want to sell tickets to the Tragedy Show.

But we don’t stop. We only thought of how to start a story, never caring how it ends. Now we aren’t a we any more. I’m barely even a broken I.

But there are harder things than this, I tell myself since you won’t listen. There are harder things, I say as I pick out shrapnel from my veins, listen to the world call me hate in your voice. There are harder things than this and I am one of those things.

At the end of the season, Christmas arrives guilt-free, equal parts indulgence & grace. An old story with pieces of comfort will make way for something new. Gifts of smiles & hope. Growing up you learn to be your own Santa Claus. This time’s gift is goodbye.

*Read my other Love Poetry. Or listen to it.