Refraction.

The Anti-Hero

I shall not wait
Any longer -
Always the bridesmaid,
Never the bride;
I am the romantic
Who writes the poetry,
Not his fated muse.
I cannot wait
To meet another like me,
To have our love
Proclaimed in verse
Only then -
What if the day never comes?
It is not guaranteed,
And thus I write this for me -
I stumble in and out of love
With this face, this body, this mind.
I have been ever so cruel,
And it has taken years to learn
How to touch this skin lovingly;
How to cope without harming it any more.
Sometimes, these days,
I fall in love with this body
When I dance -
So fascinatingly does it ripple, and
I realise
How wonderfully it serves.
There are downtrodden days
Where I have saved me:
One simplistic act sparks laughter,
And I have dragged myself
Out of the mud.
Perhaps I fall back in love with myself
When I sing,
When I mumble to myself
And burst out laughing
At the strangeness of it all.
This mind is, I think, the anti-hero -
It is overly critical, slightly too sharp,
And refuses to stand and watch
The chaos,
Even when it doesn't quite know
How to intervene.
It spins words like records
Upon the deck,
Analysis poised;
It knows too much - too much beauty,
Too much sorrow,
Too much of the limitations
Of what a heart can bear.
How I love it, and how it provokes me -
Perhaps the two are more closely linked
Than it would appear:
The arguments we have
Anchor my sanity - it weighs me down
So that I cannot drift away.
I am literally nothing without it,
And yet I realise
That I would be no better
If it were different at all:
It is mine, and I am its.
I shall learn to love it;
I shall learn to fall ever deeper
Until
I may write myself a sonnet
With nary a bad word.
This mind, this body, and the essence
Of what I am -
United will they stand.