Yesterday, she caught her curves
in the center of her palms.
She cuddled the skin
and coddled the effort
that she put in
to make it shrink
but she still thinks
it made no difference.

© Matthew Harlovic

Sometimes you're the table and sometimes you're its legs.

Either way, you've gotta carry some weight.

They tell me not to define myself by
My height
My weight
My skin color
The color of my eyes
The state of my clothing
The money in my pockets

But how am I supposed to love
Everything on my insides
When everyone else defines me
By what they see?

I can feel the pounds of burden,
Weighing on my chest.
It hurts more than anything,
I only want to rest.

I want to cry my heart out,
I want to scream my lungs open.
The everlasting pounds of agony,
Leaves me beat and broken.

You and me, sweetheart,
we need to stop thinking of ourselves
as *****-ups,

and I need to stop thinking
that writing poems for a loved one
is for *****-ups.

I need to smell your hair
in the morning,
to press against you

in the cold of the night
and not have that anvil of guilt,
that Herculean weight in the room,

crushing me, crushing you,
cracking the foundations
of what we are, and have become, and will become.

Atlas may have carried
the weight of the world

on his shoulders,
but Atlas wanted no part in it.

Let us set the weight of the world down.
Let us seek folly where we may,
and live.

Let us find
our golden apples.

Let us find them
together.

Let us find them where we may.

I can't take a full breath in, it feels like there's a weight on my chest.
A cinder block, with our initials inside a heart, etched onto the side.

I can not follow you through the holes and lanes of the skinny people, the ones you glide effortlessly through with no concern for leaving me behind.

if I moved to the moon (like
Xenon) the number of pounds I
contain would be 83.3%
less
I would be less
according to a scale on the moon