I am trying to hold myself back from loving you.

So far I have seemed to succeed
Except for the fact that I think of you everyday.

But then there you were when I wasn’t thinking about you.

A proximity that occurs due only to chance
Because we live in a small world.

Some call that fate.

But fate cannot change the entanglements
of politics and friendship.

I have alliances that cannot be broken just as much as you.

Neither of us wants complication,
Just a quid pro quo relationship that can end at our will.

It will end at your will.

I, however, am left strangling the misconception
That friendship is a precursor to love.

To your smile that lights up a room,
I curse you.
Because everything about you enamors me
To the point that I have not spoken to you
In months and yet I remember the last words of our conversations.

I cannot bear to look at those lips
That I have fantasized over time and time again,
That I’ve tried so hard to forget
On the mouths of other men.

How can I call you a man?  

Disrespect is all I hear when someone mentions your name,
But who can blame the blameless victim,
Of some tortured past that I know not?
And you just stand there and smile.
You know the part of me you have captured.

Should I feel so enraptured,
By the man who swoops in on innocent (?) souls
And makes them feel something
Special.

Is it all a game to you?

The nights I still spend sitting here
Agonizing over a fling of little proportion.
But I suppose that’s just the way I am
Falling for people all too fast
Paying no mind the inevitable gravity that will force me to crash.

It is all too familiar
This love that keeps me spiraling.
For it has happened once before;
Replaced by yours.

And I have not even graced your lips.

I have to admit I am caught between storms -
Of friendship
Of love
Of lust

And I cannot imagine one without the other two,
A trifecta of an immeasurable soul.

Because I have a deep sense of attachment to each part of this
Relationship
That now has inconceivably doubled:
I like you both.

And now I am caught in this dichotomy of I think of the other,
I smile with the other,
Which one should be the other?

He wants me to give more of myself,
While he does more than I.

Which do I put myself out for?

What if, in this scenario, I gave a part of myself to the second,
That I haven’t to the first?
I did.

But the first has taken a part of me that is deeper,
Below the skin, the surface.
And challenges me to the extent that
He knows who I am and where I’ve been.

And what about today?
Disclosing his failed attempts with his last lovers,
Not making me one,
But taking my trust and putting it in the palm of his hand?

But then there’s the second,
Who in what small measure
Has managed to smear my concept of time
And gave everything in the palm of his hand.

A whirlwind of staying up all-night and sharing
These small hours,
Imprinting him on my mind.

Who is safer?