You were the dream I awoke from, hand out-stretched, trying to shovel all the air into my mouth because I couldn't breathe at the thought of you
You were my bare legs when I looked down at school and realized I was only in my boxers
We've all had that dream
My psychology professor was bold enough to say even children have the ability to speak a sentence in words that have never been strung together before
You were every new syllable that came out of my tired, 4 a.m. mouth
You were the place I went to when my brain relaxed
You were the girl, tired of love poems, so I said I'd write one about the twenty-seven steps it takes for a caterpillar to turn into a butterfly
But have you ever noticed how much effort a butterfly puts into flapping it's wings
versus how content a caterpillar is just to munch on some leaves
Look at what this has turned out to be
A love poem of something that used to be so brilliant that maybe we were taking our own twenty-seven steps but some curious child was too busy plucking us up to squash us down when they could have been stringing together a new sentence the world has never heard
and I'm sorry
That we are nothing now except traces left on a child's hand
We are nothing but twenty-seven incomplete steps
We are nothing but unspoken words
we are nothing now
but you're still the dream I awake from sometimes
There are still fingerprints of yours on my bare legs
you're still etched into the fabric of my boxers
you're still there, you're still there