A friend of mine, one I am fairly certain would like it more if we were more...intimate, has told me that holding onto a love that I've had for a while, one greatly unreciprocated for the most part, is folly. I am foolish to hold onto this feeling that I have, that I should give up. Stubborn thing that I am, I refuse.
Unbeknownst to him, my doubts are always present. I have ran through every scenario in my head on how this plays out, and I understand the risks. Yet, doubt lingers. I was sitting in class today, and for the first time in a long time, I wrote a poem that I can actually call good. I'd like to share it with you now.
Leaving Something to be Desired
Summer gave a bounty of fruit
- apples and raspberry kisses and wine and
new cheese at the corner of your mouth, creamy and soft -
and nights spilled forth with moonshine and starlight,
dancing in your muddled irises like fairies exchanging wings for fins.
Skin and teeth and tongue and dark folds in the
sheets that conceal darker deeds with angelic exploits.
Autumn - a depression left when good-byes take our love
and stretches it over mountains and rivers and borders -
is reaching, reaching for a hand still reaching for you,
and while fingers graze each other, desire's razor,
there is not skin enough to take hold, to keep strong,
and thus we break.
We turn.
We fall. We sleep in the hibernating misery as we learn to cope
with the searing light and the snatching winds that once
you and I guarded the other against.
Winter brushes my skin, and I stand alone, once a half, now a shadow.
I ache for you like a mare whickering at a fence, which she heeds as a barrier
between her and some virile stallion, all hot blood and swollen flesh and
my heart panics, my eyes dull in the late wanting, and while
all wishes and songs yearn to tempt your ears to me, I am too far,
I run. I bolt. I dream of days and nights of walking back,
of your arms around me.
And I do return to a charred house at last, where love's mark is burned with despair.
Spring calls, and we kiss the earth where once we lay laughing
- prayers for a new dawn, like a child's hope.
Your perfect eyes bore a shiver into mine, and a flame,
somewhere, bursts into new truth, in an ether no man has touched.
Your rough, callused, gentle hand takes mine - my fence, my fury, is sated,
soothed as I remember, as sweet tasting memory returns.
The bridge is rebuilt, and our love is reborn into something bright.
The light no longer stings my eyes.
