Out on the tollroad
I see signage everywhere
Saying, “I knew you before I formed you in the womb.”
And then I knew of the concept
Before it was formed into words:
To know of one’s pain,
To be aware of pain.
I saw this drawn all over the rings
You imagined painted both our fingers.
Did you know me
Before you formed me into words?
Before I heard the words come from your mouth
I knew God, I knew gnosis, I knew the gospel
I knew bewitchment
From a grimoire, etched with hearts
And symbolology.

From there, we look for the perfect philosophy,
A biological philosophy deep latent
In the passion in the sweat on your upper arms
And leveraging all that came long before,
A generational memory
Recollected when I’m ******* on your mammaries
Realizing the good in that which
Makes my life hell
And my parents proud.

In passion, I notice the double standard,
Feeling drowned in water and this,
This is the sense of
Understanding the world
With the perfect syllabicality.
The kind where
The tokens we carry in our pockets
The ones we talk with,
Flash before love
Is ever a factor.

Too easily, do we speak about love.

How could a fetish for the perfect
Distract us enough to forget
The imperfect,
Something fear perverts far beyond utility
Something that’s far more a safer bet before
The perfect is good but not good enough
And you’ve lost your stomach to draining bottle after bowl
Seeking dopamine desperately.

You’ve been the cat in my lap
And the histamine storm
Assaulting the roof of my mouth
A reminder we can’t get too close
To the things we love,
And I’m not into you
Being so into me,
Being so bereft of the thing
Neither of us expected to happen.

The way you say you love me
Seems off balance,
Your love seems like a self-reassurance
Quietly nestled behind the greatest desire
For your worst insecurity, it is with that
I know what about yourself you love the most
It is outside the flow we promised one another
As though we’re held to the same ground
By a different gravity, said different words
That we nodded to.

It’s been said before,
I’m sorry, it was something, upon which
I thought we agreed,
There’d be no tears when we would leave.
So much wisdom is in the idiom,
“Follow your heart.”
Follow where it flows if even into the dark
If even along many streams
If even it strays, follow your sense of pain
And where it may teach you
Never to fear what you were
Meant to have
Even if it means the unfaithful
Path along the straight and narrow.