Find me in the corner of your favorite bookstore
Perched in plain view with a pretty cover
But not until you have passed over me a million times
Assuming that my lustrous cover,
often a popular attraction to those with shallow intentions
And an obtuse understanding of what good writing really is,
Is a sign that my contents will not satisfy a cultured literary connoisseur and true book lover
Not before I have been picked up again and again
By people who only bother to read my first page before placing me back on the self,
Judging me to be too arduously intellectual and esoteric to be enjoyable
And too costly for their last minute birthday present buying purposes
Lift me off the shelf without care, already disappointed too many times
To have any hope that my pages, enclosed within my flashy exterior,
Contain lines worthy of well-read minds
Pick me up because you cannot continue to claim that you love this bookstore
If you ignore my contents for any longer
Open my pages without the ceremony you usually afford
To the other books you read,
Flip to the first page and skim my first few lines as you saunter
Down the aisle to a nook,
Before you get there read my first two lines intently,
When you are almost to the cushioned corner, stop
Too consumed by the boldness of my verses
to remember where you were going, despite its familiarity
Let the reality of being in the bookshop become a backdrop
As you take the first steps of a journey with me
When I met you the life I knew and everyone in it served only as a setting
For our new love to play out and everything but you stayed in the periphery
As I got closer and closer to you, who you were coming into focus and the picture vignetting
I will continue reading until our spines are spent from use,
Until our words lose their power to seduce
Until our minds cannot even begin to remember who we were before I met you
And all our thinking becomes diffuse
This is our story
And this is my mission
I will read, and listen,
and I will kiss, and touch
And taste, and fuck
and hold, and mend,
and laugh, and smile,
And write for you,
And sing for you,
And give to you,
And love you
Until I become dust again
Returning, in a cyclic fashion,
to the same earth
You miraculously came from
YOU ARE READING
Poems
PoetryI write poetry to try to cope with my emotions and find a path forward. Here are some poems I wrote when I needed to figure things out.
