I don't want to be more.
I want to be less.
So much less that I disappear
shrink, fold
rendered
to the tiniest sliver
indiscoverable.
So minuscule,
my hands are rendered too small
to do any more damage.

She would have given anything
if she could have stopped their pain
with hers.

He offered her forbidden fruit.
She took it.
No questions asked, only glances given.
She sank her teeth into it as if it were a Georgia peach.
It was sweet, but
one taste,
and she knew why God had told her
never to touch it.
She tried to hand it back
and he started to take it,
then threw it back at her,
saying,
she had ruined it.

Don't kiss me.
My lips are rough-- pure scar tissue.
Torn,
from coughing up self-truths,
regrets, sobs, misunderstanding
and formal apologies--
I choke.
Gasp
   retch
      retch
         retch
They are always a lovely shade of red
swollen, bee-stung, sometimes bleeding,
I blot the stains,
but their shadowy ghosts remain,
haunting aches, and throbs.

Don't meet my eyes.
They are wells
one might fall into and break a leg.
They will take him out like a dying horse
and shoot him behind the barn
and bury him,
in the dank soil.
And I will come later, sorry, and put dying roses
in his dead hands.
But what for?
Company?
The dead are happy,
only misery wants company.

Don't reach for my hands.
I will hold it fast, at first,
soft anchor, and the fingers will hook into my skin,
but I, in uncertainty,
put my claws in
and then retract them, drawing blood
I never wanted on my hands.
I should have thought of this before.
I am sorry I did not.

Do not fall in love with me.

I will miss Autumn here.
The crisp days of October, startling the remnants of summer
into hiding.
The homely smell of hearth burned pine and smoked meat
drifting from chimneys built
by long-dead grandfathers.
The battle fields will be beautiful.
Bathed in maples,
harmless blood of leaves, though the earth
still bears streaks
of death.
The grasses, drying, dying, in the cooling air
will whisper to the sojourners passing through,
seeking sites of ancestors
whose voices they never knew.
I will not be here
to slip the fallen leaves
between phone-book pages or
paste and sew them
to handmade paper.
My mother will stare at the tangled thread,
the blank sheets,
left untouched on my desk,
and ask my father
where the time went.

If I am only ever a poem to you, I will be satisfied. A poem you heard someone read once, but you can’t remember the title, and only a few lines stick out. Snatches of speech still hang in a dusty closet of memory. Aired out by similar voices, phrases, overheard on the subway or at the supermarket. Somewhere in song lyrics you find a line, half a line, speak it softly to yourself. You may be aware of how your tongue bends to the words, notice how it brushes the roof of your mouth, and feel the edges of your lips come together— you might not.

It will not be constant. I will not be the belabored sonnet, the endless chant, the mantra you repeat day after day. I will be the fleeting thought, epiphany of memory, the light ache of a barely recalled past. Easily lost, in life, in noise, lost in the millions of words and notes swimming in your brain, fallen between synapses and currents. Half remembered, half lost— eternally. The half life reminder of a woman, a girl, in love with language, and lost in thought.

If I am never anything but a poem to you, I am satisfied.

Maybe
Love is nothing
but a rib spreader.