this is (not) a heartache poem
about
you or the way
your eyes stood glossy and
your mouth silent
in large crowds of people –
your
demeanour slowly playing
over me
time and time again,
even when i swore to myself that i would
shut you out
for good
but,
like your smile stuck in my brain,
it kept coming
back.

please understand that there is (no)
heartache here
because this is(n’t) a
poem
about how i spent my life in
paragraphs
filled with every beautiful,
treacherous
word i could think of
while you lived in
shallow, broken
sentences
or
how i could see you perfectly
through the flesh and bone and *******
that
nobody else knew about.

could you see
how much
i longed for you to
take me in the way i
was –
speak to me in the carefully rationed
words of your
stories –
anything that could’ve
brought me closer to you but instead,
only burned
inconceivably
in the wildfires of all you
cared about?

did i end up in those fires too?
were you so certain that i would just
forget
how you stopped sending me
the texts
that i waited
oh-so long for?

were you so certain that i
would have
let you slip away so easily
after the way you lead me to
believe
there was something
between us?

well, i did(n’t),
yet, just the thought of it
kills
me to remember how
you were the brightest star in my universe but
i
was just a mere speck of dust
in yours.

this will (not) be another poem
where
i dream about
watching every bone in
your body cave in
or
feeling your breath
against my ears
but (no),
trust me, there is (no) heartache
that i have
for you
or anything you ever did
in the last seven months we spent
together
that always left me dreaming
on a prayer -
but never listened to.

i know you didn’t want me.
i know you didn’t care.
i was just another one to you.

this is (not) a poem about
how i’m now
broken
because you left me
even though
you weren’t mine –

for where i am
now is(n’t)
heartache.