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Matthew Skelly Oct 2013
My life is the stage.
The bright lights shimmering on the black gloss of the piano,
the intent audience beaming with anticipation,
the spine-tingling shivers you get when everything goes right.

I love the stage.
You leave it and people clammer about you,
force feeding you words of affection,
words of excitement,
words of belief.

No one ever wonders what it’s like when you leave the stage.
Do they really care?

A week after a show:
an army of fans.
Two weeks after a show:
they ask for you to do it again.
Three weeks after a show:
it’s like you never existed.

Is all you want from me a song,
a monologue,
a poem?

Did you ever stop to think that I’m more than just a voice,
a face,
a pen?

I feel like you think I’m a machine,
heartless,
soulless.

I am human too,
I am a pulse too,
and I am a soul too.

My life is the stage.
When I leave it,
I become my own shadow.

Matthew Skelly
October 5, 2013
Haven't really written poetry in four months, so it's not that great.
Matthew Skelly Sep 2016
Never should I love,
For never will you love me.

Never will your deep, blue eyes
Look in mine and read my mind,
Like a psychic running her fingers along the lines of my palms.
Palms that belong to hands you’ll never hold,
And handle with care like you would antique china
And at the same time grip with a firmness that tells me you’ll never let go.
You’ll never let go because you’ll never wrap your soft,
warm arms around me in the first place.
Your soul will never entangle with mine and fill that void
Left by a **** sliced deep within me.

A **** left by my father’s youth,
And my mother’s faith,
Whose knife cut out their acceptance for me
And gouged out my trust in them.

Can’t you see that you are the antidote to my lifelong suffering?
The Accutane to my welted face,
The braces to my crooked teeth,
The nitro to my aching heart
The rhino to my bulging nose
The morphine to my broken mind,
The running to my fading health
Running, running, running away
Far away from this broken house
Where your dreams never do come true and
Where you come out to yourself alone in the bathroom and
Where they can’t ever know the truth because my house is
Where God resides in the attic and
Where Jesus is the only one you should let in your room at night and
Where The Holy Spirit has possessed us all to live a lie because my house is
Where lifelong love is dead at the delivery room
And who is there to blame but me?

Who is there to blame but me?

But none of that matters to you.
It can’t matter to you,
Because all you do is love
And love
And love
And love
And love.

But you never love me.

Each year I have known you
I have reached out farther than the last,
Yearning for something I could never obtain.
Fifteen pushes past Fourteen,
Both of whom fall short of Sixteen’s growing arms,
Which are narrowly outpaced by Seventeen’s spindly, wirey fingertips.

Every Year’s efforts have met the same fate;
Failing to reach their target they instead grasp fruitlessly
Into a dark, brewing storm,
Full of tears,
And of crackling sparks of hope
That are met with the resounding booms of fate
Telling me that I am doomed to be alone.

Telling me that never should I love,
For never will you love me.

But I never listen.
Because I know you too well.
And I know that someday,
Someday soon,
You’ll make the happy accident
Of stepping too close to my many straining hands,
And I’ll pull you near to me
And you’ll realize that you never loved her at all.

And that you always,
always have loved me.

-The Boy Who Loves You Too

— The End —