to the man who loves me next and last

at some point i'll have to tell you that I've
been waiting for you for years, and that in
the hearts of every passer-by I saw bits and
pieces of who i thought you'd be, half-truths
and mostly lies, fantasies and countless scenarios
buried in an inch of sand at the bottom of a flower
vase

that at one point you were a Chris or a Chaz and several
other men who never even made it past the door, sometimes
tall and usually short and even missing half of your pinky
in 2013--

but as it turns out, I always kept walking, and sometimes the
ground shifted forward and carried me away-- there were a
few detours and places where I'd be standing beneath a swinging
stoplight for an indeterminate amount of time, where I sent a hundred
postcards to friends and family in riddles and broken
seashells, roots still damp and undeveloped strips of film

And there were many days where I sat staring out the window
at the storm clouds rolling over the arkansas river, carving another
man's name into a birch tree dug into the shore, nestled into a hundred
other initials-- wondering if his hands were yours or yours his and if he'd be you or you'd be him--quit smiling like that, i mean it.

But if you count the number of days I work throughout the year and
realize that for all of those I twisted an apple stem and always came up
on a different letter, you might think I was a little bit obsessive about
my dreams which is probably why you never showed up--
when I was deep in between the mountains, trekking in the tall grass where the cicadas vibrated the muggy august air--

I'll have to admit these things to you, divulge the secrets to my fridge
and buy new perfume to christen you with the seasons, share the passwords for my wifi and clear playlists filled with memories of other people, but if you can believe it--I think we're a little bit closer.

things are moving pretty fast and I'm being shoved along as if by wind or flood or corn plow, scooped up and cultivated, i've been having dreams of multitudes, of wading out into the ocean to scoop up fish
and sea glass with silver flecks, old flattened coins with thick films of
verdigris--

I'll be sitting at work completely disgusted by myself--and that's how I'm sure. That I am becoming less of who I was and more of who you'll know, less of a thought and more of a concrete idea, a person, someone
worthy. Everything used to be discussed based on how worthy it was of me, but maybe I need to be
worthy of
you.


I'll have to tell you these things.