February

Rent is due tomorrow,

(curse these short months)

I paid forty dollars for groceries,

(even this seemed too much)

and my throat is sore,

What is there to do about it these days?

I am eating a five dollar fill up,

ten minutes before class,

listening to the boys who are legally men,

discuss politics they don’t understand.

I wonder how I got here,

and why the poetry

took so long to find me

in an artsy town.

 

Did it confuse me for someone else?

Did it get distracted by the music, the artists, the writers?

I’d understand if it did,

for I’m not much of any of those anymore.

 

 

My Pen

I have lost myself

the day I sat down my pen

and told It I would not be writing anymore

 

It could not understand what it had done

although I told It

again and again

that it were not the one to blame for our unfortunate departure

(in terms of friendship)

that all good things come to an end

and so mediocre things must end also

if ending is what’s cool these days

for the Good to want to do it

 

It expressed to me in the simplest of language

(though colloquial and so not that simple at all)

that it did not want me to go

We had good times, It said

Great times, even

We have laughed and cried

and have made others laugh and cry as well

and that says something

We were good together you and I, It said

Why do we have to say goodbye?

 

And I made fun of It for rhyming

we don’t usually do that you see

And so I sat It down even closer

and told It the truth

 

I’m not done writing really, I said

(though how I wish that were the truth)

I have merely taken up typing

I have to be with the times you see

Nothing printed can be published anymore

and printing is all we know how to do

and yes signatures are important

but they don’t really count

 

It cried and cried

It’s blue ink somehow smearing onto everything I own

and I let it

for one day I found my pen had dried up

and without too much guilt

I threw it away

ran to my keyboard

and wrote this

Written for you as you while I read a book written for neither of us but somehow as both

When something, metal or hard plastic and cold, presses against you leg, leaving its cool imprint branded on your thigh even after tens of minutes, turning to halves and then hours since it being taken away. The same feeling can be felt with you.

For even after weeks of minutes, turning to months and then years, your imprint around my waist and arms still brand me, chilling my bones as I walk through the days that I defy as lonely, although admitting that would be the first truth I have told myself in months.

I miss your hugs. Although I have only felt them one, twice, three times, but that was enough to know you were something I would carry in my pocket, no matter the size, for as long as the weight would let me, being years, until your written name reminding me that you still had a life worth living convinced me that although pockets fit poems and you fit a poem perfectly, words are really no one’s to own. For even the writer accepts this willingly as he sprawls ink onto the page.

But you were pages of verse that then became an illustration, and I find that harder to let go of than a couple of lines.

So be the poetry with me, you would say, for even though your head dreamt dreams of different views, you loved me, not unlike I had for you. For although I longed for your closeness and yearned for your fingertips to, too, reach for mine, you never had to stay.

And yet.

And I loved you for it. So much that it causes shivers as I think about it, curled into a ball with my bare feet entangled within the cool sheets, for my limbs still feel your vacancy as cold and hard and breath snatching as a freezing shower forced upon you on a lonely February day, due to the lack of warmth in the water heater. It’s synchronicity impeccable to life as it is in moments like this.