One of these days, the glimmer in your eye that knocks me out will actually break me,
And then my words and reservoir of tears will shatter into shards of truth
That stick into and stain your hands when you apologetically try to sweep them up.
It’s not a ******* secret that I live for the hours that I can pretend that maybe,
One of these nights, I’ll be with you in more than just my mind and yours
As you grip the banister to ascend to silken sheets and wine-fed dreams.
I bite my tongue so words don’t leak, and lick my lips so as to keep them here,
Rather than the curving place behind your ear… the stalwart jaw… the capable lips that draw me near…
The things I’d do were waters clear…
The answer’s written in an inky, contractual ultimatum that squashes the fruit of imagination.
And yet, a fierce, poisonous force rises from the depths of a desirous ***** within,
And whispers to me that with contracts, there are ways to blot, smear, and tear. It scares me.
I lock it in a closet of infectious notions that I’ll slowly dematerialize with clean blood,
But rivers of the stuff won’t run clear when they’re magnetized so close to the sin
That doesn’t feel like sin, and that beckons as a beacon of bright and beautiful things.
It’s a difficult conclusion to arrive at: I must be the bad guy.
I am the mind’s mistress, the secret-almost-lover, the temptation, the promise, the snake…
Yet also the forgotten, the disappointed, the frustrated, the one who MUST keep control, the Saint.
We both know that I’ll keep floating back; my curiosity, passion, fascination, and need to learn and share
Will always countervail the weight of my exasperation and guilt-laden vexation,
Until one of these days when the glimmer in your eye that knocks me out actually breaks me.
08/24/12
An Eagle Creek poem.
