I don't want to be the last petal to fall
Don't want to be the only one at last call
I don't want to live over the hill
I don't want to be the last one that will

Don't want to be the last of my friends
Don't want to be the last to trend
Don't want to go in the out door
Don't want to go on about this anymore

Every time I’m happy, for reasons I don’t know,
Lights flash in my heart and it kind of . . . . discos.

Why not a waltz, polka, salsa, jive, tango or calypso?
Of all dances, I am not sure why it chooses to disco.

Perhaps, it’s a dance that it can dance on it’s own,
A dance in merry solitude when I might be alone.

Maybe, I grew up in the time when Saturday Night Fever was in tow,
When pop charts went tizzy with songs that’d make the world boom-boom go.

Maybe, my heart beats to the rhythm of life, at times funky, at times slow,
Maybe, it’s in tune with electronic sounds around me — that in a humdrum, flow.

The top left chamber of my heart, leaps, jumps and thumps so,
The bottom right chamber shakes a leg to a psychedelic-lights-show.
My arteries and ventricles throb and pulsate oh . . . OH!
Pumping blood in a sudden rush all the way to my toes.

And like the ever-glittering disco ball, I spin, shine and glow,
Every time I’m happy, my heart jumps . . . And a-dancing it goes

I never understood the sentence
"I have my heart in my mouth."
Not until I tasted it,
not until I spit it,
not until the words got stuck in my throat
because I felt a weight on my mouth that didn’t let me breathe.

I didn’t understand the sentence
until I felt my chest empty
and its beating on my neck.
Until I cried because I couldn’t even talk.

I didn't understand what
"Having your heart in your mouth"
meant
until I found it there
and I had no one to turn to.

It is finished!

Now, at the end, over the vista of anxiousness, I can sense relief!

I can sense more peace and that everything will fall into place.

I may still experience bouts of grief,
But they won’t consume my face.

As I focus on yonder, I can sense this time was yet brief,
And as I hold things more lightly, I can revel in the vast wonder of space and My Maker’s trace.

You are the warmth in the serenity I never drank,
the final page of a novel I hold off reading
just to stretch the story one more night.
You are the lullaby I hummed when I forgot the lyrics
but remember the ache.

I think I’ve been writing to you in everything—
in the way I halt at fullstops
Because I'm afraid
there's always an end from a beginning
I do not know the color of your eyes,
but I know how they’ll light up when you speak of things you love.
I haven’t felt your hand in mine,
but I know how I’ll memorize the curve of your thumb
like it’s punctuation—
a comma in the sentence of my life
that says: pause here. something beautiful is coming.

If you’re wondering,
yes—
I’ve saved you all the best lines.
The ones that never made it into poems
because they were too soft, too sacred, too soon.
They live folded in my chest
like notes passed under desks in classrooms of longing.
I don’t send them,
because I want to give them to you in person—
when we are older,
and ready,
and brave enough to admit we were always meant to find each other
in a world full of almosts.

And when you arrive—
with your quiet eyes and your laugh that tastes like home,
don’t be surprised if I cry.
Not because I am sad,
but because it is a kind of grief
to wait so long for a face you already loved
in every stranger that almost looked like you.

To you, whom I haven’t met yet—
come slowly,
but come.
This heart has been keeping time in poetry,
and every line
has always led me to you.


Erennwrites