TO BE LOVED / poetry

XI

HERE IS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN | 19.08.2019

here is what you are to me:
fingers, blinded pink by dawn,
dipping halfway into a river.
a fogged-up glass in slow-moving cars.
hair up, sitting side-by-side,
soft-spoken even at midnight.

i walk into rooms and you're always partly there,
corners and wisps, two sock-covered feet;
i walk out of rooms and you never seem to follow.

here is what you make me feel:
sometimes you give me the tiniest look,
and suddenly i am out of place,
nearly out of time.
the flowers in my hand all fall back to the soils.

i'd like to rip apart one edge of a photograph, rip apart one edge of anything.
see if the sound i make is louder
than any you ever will.
it is hard to love,
but even harder to love quietly.

here is what i think we will be:
a wintry station, dead of night,
where the clock hangs peach-ripe at two fifty a.m.
headlights, on both ends,
we stop with a sigh to rest for a while.
weary-eyed, a little lonely,
you tell me things,
and i feel safe in my vulnerability.
but then a whistle,
an overhead announcement,
and we are moving again now in opposite directions.

i understand now
why love songs sound so much like red apple days,
why there's no poems or songs big enough
for the thing rattling in your chest.
words don't have to be pretty sometimes,
they just have to tell a story.

here is what i will do:
i think wanting to be in love
and never having been,
is like having everything blur away,
like standing in a room
with a radio on in another.
you hear the murmur and the strains,
old love songs that are a little sad
but mostly grand;
and they all come muted and a little peripheral,
but you will never know.
not until you move to open the door.

missing steps
and crooked smiles, too easy on the eyes;
maybe what i was looking for in others
was what i needed from myself all along.

buttons on a coat,
two mugs of tea and a quiet thank you.
they say turn your pain into art,
and give it a better home than your hollow bones.
they say turn sadness into music,
heartache into paintings and sculptures,
so it lives on outside of you.

this time i think i will find solace
firstly,
in myself.
and then, in others.

________________
A/N: this one is a bit longer and cheesier — can you tell who's crushing hard right now? :')

i fall for strangers easily, and end up with all these flowers in my chest. so i thought i'd make a bouquet with it. i hope you liked it - this is essentially me realizing how loving myself comes above loving others.

and how sometimes, the way you want others to love you is exactly how you should love yourself.