We were seventeen and I carved
your silhouette like Michaelangelo
carved David -- but instead of leaving
your statue in a museum, I nailed
it to my mind.

This way, the guards wouldn't
run toward me every time I tried
to touch you.

Three years have gone by and the summer
has ended, but I haven't found the strength
to dismantle your statue.

When I walk through the hallways of
my mind it's always the first thing I see,
morning or midday or night.

Sometimes I'm surprised to see your marble
eyes staring back at me, and for a moment
I'm amazed that I once had the imagination
and artistic ability to build
you from nothing.

You are the statue of David.

I am ready to take a hammer and
tear you down, to let dynamite explode
next to you. But something stops
me every time.

Because how can I destroy such
a masterpiece? A work of art that I've
put months and years into?

So you remain an exhibit,
glorious. So you remain a distraction.
Because every time I walk by you, no
matter where I'm headed or how much
of a rush I am in to get there, I'm
compelled to stop and stare.

You are the statue of David.

And I am a seventeen-year-old girl
who was once kicked out of the museum
for getting too close.

words overflow, pouring
out of me, spilling
into a mess. you wait
patiently, drowning.

i am reminded by the color of the
leaves, transforming from
grass to lightning to fire to sun,
that this is what precedes
the wave of the hand and
the tip of the hat
goodbye, that
Ephemerality and Finality
were brothers

i saw your silhouette
amidst a Monday morning’s
sleepless dream — hazy, but
not determined enough
to obscure the memory
of Time’s clashing dance

sometimes my heart feels like the
arts and crafts project of
a first grader, gone wrong.
messy Kraft glue, over-applied
to the point where
the pieces don’t stick —
together, we will
never be
together.

you know that feeling when
you finally get over someone,
and you think you’re free,
free to be by yourself for a while… and you get ready for the calm,
but the calm never comes?

i think that’s what my
entire life has been
like;

Robert Frost sat in a chair.
Robert Frost wore a hat that
I don’t quite know how to describe
(was it a beret?)
and smoked from a hookah.
He let the smoke out from his mouth
and disappeared in it.

(Robert Frost was not the man
who wrote that poem about
two roads diverged in a wood and I…
I took the one less traveled by.)

Robert Frost was a man who I loved
very much and who I believe did
not love me.

He was an enigma to me
and I was one to him…
but he was effortless, and
I was planned.

My heart was set on Frost but
I never quite (or
I suppose at all)
won him --

he chose her, which
tortured my heart at the time, but
today…
…I am happy,
happy for him.

Robert Frost sat in a chair
smoking from a hookah.
He disappeared into the smoke and
I stared at him,
mesmerized.

He was the cuts on my arms
and the bruises on my thighs,
the bags under my eyes for the late nights
I stayed up crying;
the slump in my shoulders,
the hesitation in my stare --

in every way the source of my misery and
yet in every way,
while blinding,
my hope.

Because love is painful
and it hurts
and sometimes I don’t know
if I can handle the weight that
it puts on my shoulders --
crippling me.

I see a picture of you
and I don’t know where to go,
My heart stops and
I’m left here, alone.

I, sitting at my table, mindlessly
picking at my spaghetti -- the accordion
billowing a tune
of days long past -- staring
at this music man,
the way his lip doesn’t quiver
when he plays a beautiful song but
no one claps, and I,
wondering, why he plays, every night,
for an audience that does not
listen, and then, considering, perhaps,
he is not playing for
the audience.

I lie in silence
waiting, as time does not wait
for me to catch up --
the sun awakens the sky
but my eyes stay shut.