Love poem: Drawing in a coffee shop
This is a love poem, and I wish it wasn’t.
I just want
To cascade over you like smooth waterfalls
Barely a blink
Come up for air
In the clandestine, vogue-painted closet tone-deaf chambers
Where satin and silk are interchangeable,
Even though the mechanisms stretch far past
What the modern seamstress can manage
Irreversible damage
To my hippocampus, and I think it’s making the horizon easier to navigate
Isn’t that a lovely thought?
Jolly ranchers for two, I’ll split one with you
I’ll split you in two
The grave filth that the manager keeps echoing in his 9-story apartment building
The couple on the seventh floor doesn’t know their floor has a leak
And I feel like I haven’t been asleep for weeks
For a prime suspect, I make a good candidate
And I make my bed
Before sunrise, or in the afternoon
I knew it was too soon to move in
And a panic started beckoning within
But if steel fences were like a goldfish that looks at you with a sideway’s glance when you’re paying attention to both his soft edges and the horror of your depleted reflection upon the opaque glass water chamber
I’d be able to dissolve my fears ambiguously
And not hold a ceremony
Because I don’t like being on stage
Nor holding a payphone
Nor sitting in an airplane aisle seat because I think that’s too far away that I am from blue
I don’t regret letting myself want you
For now, the trail has narrowed, and I’m even more sure of the concepts that my timid nature thought I knew from before
But hadn’t yet fully absorbed
Even though my nerves
Stood still with dawn’s headlights shining their vinyl arterial lining luminescence forward
Softly but forever remarkable
Diverging a separate path for a quiet evening amongst the vivid skyscrapers,
That spill vacantly flowing and simultaneously churning blood all over the paved city streets and their locked corridors
A lost art, I’m sure
I try not to step too close
I love my lavender bedrooms wall the most
I might as well write a poem about how they surround me, like silk cotton webs that disappear when touched
A new collection of elegant charcoal grey fine-point pens
With ink that covers the palm of my hand
A grocery shopping list
Paid my bills on the fifth
And ever since we split
I’ve been wondering if nostalgia feels different to different people
Or if there’s a place where one can collectively mourn
To feel part of a generational gap that
Splits into definitives
Like a blueberry raspberry sorbet cut into two separate wholes,
Both of which are for me
I turn the pages; I adjust my glasses
I picture my cat telling me she didn’t like you
And I almost laugh at myself, but then I think that would be strange
I didn’t like the way you tried to pull her off the bed
But it said so much
I was probably too hungover to think very much of it at the time, that very second in your transparent presence that awakens me now
But now, with my caramel espresso and my obsolete, filed manuscripts
I venerate how smooth of a current I created
Like the gentlest riverbed
That you could fall off your yacht into
And it would absorb you without agony
Without desperation or offbeat candor
A modern-day orchestration of a segment of contribution
You – to the waves
The waves to the mariner’s life
The ships to the tide pools,
The time I couldn’t find, the time to divide
If something bigger than you consumes you,
Without delineating a debt,
Without drawing a line
How close is too close before it becomes just fine
How fast do we absorb each other’s embers before we collapse in time
I still think of how I looked at you while you were drawing in the coffee shop
