i extract poetry from your facebook chats
and tenderness from your skype calls
this: the compromise of a romantic heart
in the face of modern ephemera
since i cannot scale your balcony
like i memorize your wall
(o sweet o lovely wall
thanks courteous wall)
nor can i woo you or ****** you
without google as my cyrano
i worry for the endurance
of a love without tree-carved initials
and sigh over perceived corruption
caused by emoticons over emotion
though i’m sure if mr wilde could text
or byron could bbm
they’d not forego their lovers’ notice
for the sake of pure romance
they’d embrace any fleeting mention
with disregard for rose colored glasses
not moon over the glare of history’s glance
they’d kiss them with x’s
and serenade them with youtube
and covet any moment not spent
with them on their mind
so my conflict is resolved
and my star-crossed thoughts soothed
when they caution most ominously
that anything on the internet
can never truly disappear.

the only boy i ever loved
is awake while i am sleeping
the tinman boy lives upside-down
but in my tongue i keep him

while screens have saved us tenfold times
i still sit and mull your visit
those days spent tangled in your hair
i won’t admit i miss it.

you drove stick-shift but held my hand
jumped guardrails and pythons and nerves
painted me with waterfall clay
and careened around my curves

your tongue is strings on violins
and i am no virtuoso
each rusted joint creaks heartless songs
while my will swings to and fro

you’re tension like a tinder box
or a match-head ripe for striking
i can’t speak freely of your hands
but found them to my liking

i hope i am not novelty
or distraction wrapped in ennui
i, for one, am enthralled by you
and how you can’t sing on-key

raggedy thoughts bite (just like you)
of distance and futures and you
sentences always end with you
except when you want them to

the only boy i ever loved
is spiteful and tragic and sweet
the tinman boy lives far away
at least until next we meet

when i begin to free-wheel
and shudder with contempt
i take comfort in the thought
that we are mostly born to fail.

honey-slow days are steeped in loss,
marinated in missed opportunities
sweetly whistling tunes that pipe
"all is well because all will be, regardless."

my life might have no payoff
to the meandering silk i weave
and death could prove a hostel,
relief from what i was born to carry.

effort always looks to me
like a lack of priorities
while i jealously guard potential
and covet their delusions.

i'm a coward gently born
to soft beds and microchips
and indulgence of my worst self
when i am too afraid to move.

i am worried i am a narcissist
for wanting to keep breathing
soon picnics and parties become noble acts
proof of love through self-flagellation.

i've heard that poets see farther
but i don't even know metric units
so how can i tell anyone how far ahead
the beginning begins and the end ends?

She infects everyone around her with a longing for poetry like she was Ebola. The need climbs into you and pours itself out your eyes and ears and mouth and nose and streams out of every orifice until all you can see is seeping Neruda stanzas and oozing cummings fragments. It is agony in which you have no choice but to luxuriate. You could writhe around on beds of darling buds of May and tear out fistfuls of a host, of golden daffodils and still you are saturated with a yearning for its persistence.

She has that effect on everyone.

You are not her Moon or Stars or World.

You are not her captain, her Lesbia, her Red, Red Rose.

She may be your muse, but she owes you nothing.