1.
Hope secretly
Invites the enemy,
Our intrusive thoughts,
To invade and berate;
The constant onslaught of imagination
Gives rise to futures our hearts crave.
Silly that we welcome openly
That which causes us pain.

2.
Hope, too, in it’s supposed omniscience
Does its best to shield us,
To offer us the much-needed embrace
And gentle whispers
Of friends and lovers-

It will get better,
It is going to be okay.

3.
When is it okay to trust
What hope has to tell us?
How can we see
Past the mirage it creates that
We so desperately give chase to?

Reason, although strong,
Cannot alone dissipate the heartache
That is born from Hope,
But Will, Concentration,
Acknowledgment,
Surely these help
Clean the mess that’s left behind
When we hope
For too much.

One lived experience to the next,
We wait in constant anticipation
Of the known unknowable.
We ache, and we long to ache
For those which make us feel seen.
With strength and with beauty,
We uphold our heads,
Or at least make it seem that way,
And smile to divert from the eyes,
Which reveal more than what we can say.

Despite these, we still have been gifted:
To sing, to dance,
To love, and to be loved,

To, when nothing else can be said,
Sit amongst each other,

And hope.

He told me I’d hate him,
That he’s changed from when we last spoke,
Which always reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates
Who urged to me that people do not change,
But rather that they become more themselves.
And I ask often whether her assessment was correct,
Whether or not growth is rather just an acceptance
Of how things truly should be.

What would the daisy say to the young girl
Plucking petals from her?

He loves me…

One petal lost from her beautiful visage.

He loves me not…

One more lost from the flower of her mind
Rooted in beds of uncertainty and anguish.

We give much weight to four-letter words
As if, like Atlas, they can hold and suspend us
As if they alone can surmise what the meaning entails.

The girl wept when the last petal blew away
And the daisy, in her last moments, replied

You loved me not.

Flirting motions of wings
Fluttering between the fleeting
And everlasting feelings of togetherness
Dividing and intertwining amongst lovers
Converging at a single point
Meeting each other as if for the first time
Hoping for permanence
Again

Longing and want makes rejection
A much harder pill to swallow.
This pill, it turns out,
Does not immediately dissolve,
Is not so quickly absorbed
Into the bloodstream.
Which again makes the pain much deeper.
“It will pass,” they share with me,
“Let things run its course,” I am told.
And I wonder how much longer
I must endure this until
It completely is out of my system.

What pained me most about your moment
Of hunger and betrayal
Was that while ***** hands reached
And devoured,
Those sick fingers must have found
The charm I placed around your neck,
The one you had worn since Christmas,
The one that made your cheeks flush,
The one that tethered us,
The one that read:

I love you.

The embrace we shared at midnight,
How we didn’t care for the passersby,
And only were absorbed in the peace that
Nighttime and the moon can ensure; our hands
Kneading our softness together, reaching and
Searching, pulling me deeper than I already was.

And when our mouths and hips collided,
Deconstructing barriers and creating
An almost Rorschach test of our wants,
My longing for that forbidden fruit grew.