I just wish I could get my
head and my heart
to play on the same team,
but they are constantly
at
odds.

My heart still yearns for
a man that
never loved me to begin with,
convinces me that
it's worth responding when
he texts me some
empty ******* that
momentarily assuages his guilt
for his selfishness.
On a Saturday night when
all my friends are off with
someone who loves them,
my heart pumps heavy
against my hollowed chest,
trying to manipulate my
fingers like weak little
puppets,
persuading them to send a text
I will regret in the morning.
My heart replays the words he spoke,
the times he made me feel like I mattered,
the way our bodies made art,
how he understood me like
no one else ever has.
What if I made a mistake,
my heart demands of me,
a mistake in cutting him out,
in choosing to ignore his texts,
in attempting to move forward?
What if no one else will
ever open
their ears to all of my secrets,
their eyes to all of my skeletons,
their hearts to all of my mistakes?
What if I missed my
chance for love?
Remember, my heart whispers,
how he stayed up all night
unfolding himself
and
how you shared your poetry
and
how he sent you a text a day with
a new matter to ponder
and
how he knew what you thought
before you said a word
and
how he understood every
face you made and what it meant
and
how the lyrics you heard
always mattered to him
and
how he cared about what you were learning
and
how the minuscule moments
of your life meant the world to him...
or so he claimed.

And then my brain swoops in
to remind me how
he was all words, no action.
Days and weeks went by
without a peep
even though the week before
he had insisted on showing up at your
apartment five days in a row.
All he cared to do with you,
my brain recalls,
is share a smoke on the roof
and discuss life,
but never did he once care to
share in the outside world
with someone who he so claimed to love.
My brain reminds me of
the secrets he kept,
of the woman he lived with
behind my back,
of the gross refusal to make a commitment
even when he claimed
he would think of me in his last moments
and that he had never
felt for another like he did for me.
My brain knows of his emptiness,
of his excuse-making,
of how he blamed everything on his
pathetic circumstances
when he really was just a
selfish ******* who deserves
not a moment more of my time,
ever.
When I get those texts
that claim he's thinking of me
after church or
send me song lyrics in some
pathetic attempt to reawaken our
"connection,"
my brain reminds me to
ignore,
to remember that words are empty,
to wait until he becomes man enough
to give me what I deserve.

My heart makes me weak.
My brain keeps me strong.
My heart wants you.
My brain doesn't need you.
And even though I want
to listen to my heart,
my brain knows better.

I once saw a man sitting at
the bar of one of my favorite dives,
and he looked so handsome in his
profile,
his lips gingerly kissing a bottle
of craft beer,
his suit fitted just right
against his sculpted
frame.

He stared intently through his
trendy glasses
at the glow of his
laptop screen,
and I imagined he was
reading something involving
important business,
or maybe a book about a
new age philosophy as he
pondered the meaning of life.

He seemed so comfortable
and familiar in his
solitude,
like he traveled often and
had grown to love himself
immensely;
he valued his alone
time.

I imagined he went to some
ivy league school,
like Brown or Cornell,
where he studied business and
made his parents proud.
He still likes to learn and finds
the world to be a
blissfully curious place.

I was enthralled with
the picture I had drawn in
my head as I
gazed at his strong jaw
and white smile,
and I couldn't help but whisper
to my friend how
infatuated I was with the
view from
my seat in our wooden booth,
when my friend chuckled
nervously,
his brows downturned as he
erased all I had
drawn and replaced the
picture with
he's homeless.

My life constitutes of
a dichotic shift as I
drift
between
a state of self-assuredness
and self loathing.

When I am assured
I am sure
that my eyes are a
golden brown,
my smile whitened and straightened
with perfectly painted lips.
My eyelashes curl upward
as I give you my most intriguing smirk,
inducing you into giving me
those copies for free
and saying "Ay girl"
as I cross the street.
My jeans hug my hourglass figure
like a girl from a video,
and the compliments find themselves
going my way.
My brain swells with
knowledge and an almost-eery insight
as I predict your admiration
and find myself compensating as to
not appear
ostentatious.
I hold myself with the highest regard and
refuse to let a man
make me feel inferior,
to judge me by my exterior because
I am superior to that
treatment.
My wit is quick and
you can bet I'll put a
Slick Rick in his
place if he is even fit to
keep up with my pace.

But then again
I look at him and see
him frowning at my
symmetrical, but overly round
face,
thinking that there might
be other ladies in this place
with a smaller frame,
with a flat stomach and
a tame sense of style,
not a fedora or Timberland boots or a beanie,
not someone who cackles when
she laughs
and talks even more loudly and
obnoxiously than she chuckles.
I'm not smooth enough to
keep your attention as
my obsession with Harry Potter accidentally
gets disclosed,
as I feel my skin-diseased cheeks
bleeding through their concealer and bronzer mask.
A law school degree sounds boring and
braggy as I grasp
at straws, at my only backup source of comfort,
as I attempt to woo you with my brain because
you clearly aren't into a size ten.
You glance out of the sides
of your eyes as you buy me a drink,
or you tell me you aren't
ready for a relationship
even though we've been
sleeping together for a year;
"it's just not you, it's me"
is what I finagle
as a girl named Hailey
posts a picture of you with
your arm around her size two
waist and top-heavey Double D's.
I let down all of my walls and
you forget my birthday,
and I stay devastated over you long
enough for you to
forget my name.

I'm two-in-one;
I'm confidently lacking in confidence and
disapprovingly disapprove of
anyone's opinion of me
but my
own.

I once heard that there are
two kinds of love.
The first kind is the kind from
the movies,
the songs,
the Shakespearian sonnets,
the red-wine-induced conversations;
it is the
magnanimous
amorous
empowering love
that makes you lose your breath
and stumble across your words
until you fall so hard you
float back to the sky,
so emboldened you could
conquer the world in one fell swoop
and inspire hope in the most
hopeless.
The second kind
is the opposite of
empowering for it is
devouring,
cowering,
manipulative,
cold, and
a road paved with
adoring anguish as you
pour all of your bloated heart into
a desperate wish.

I've become exhausted by
door number two
and sit on the lip of
a hope and a prayer that
door number one opens for me
before I quit the
games(how).