You wished someone would have told you
What you've learned all too well to be true of love
Or of things regarding love
Not quite called Love
But in the same realm-
That well-kept muscle
Its familiar abrasions
The tried treatments that both heal and repair-
But you curse the wise ones for fooling you
For watching you reach deeper into the rabbit hole
Believing you could solve the trick
That you could sustain the glimmer in discovery
Could decipher the magic in the mechanism
that keeps so many scratching their scalps
But no, nobody ever explained
Out of all the things they took the time to explain
How to see past the smokescreens of future lovers
How to keep the scarves unknotted
The chosen card in clear view
How to reattach the half-sawed figure you'd find yourself to be...
I wish when my heart asked to love you
I filled up a carton with twenty-plus sticks of you and smoked them all at once until I was too sick to care
That I'd applied numbing cream and waxed the hairs you caused to stand on end
Or that these walls cock-blocked your calls
And my journals were bound with acid-dipped paper and penned in disappearing ink
Maybe I wouldn't feel so uncomfortable in my own skin
in my own mind
in my own bed
Maybe I'd keep better balance on both feet
And stop dodging birds that fly well above head
Or curse uneven sidewalk blocks beside streets
That lead me only in circles
If only the revolving doors of your heart
Had a chance meeting with the shattered mirrors of mine
Maybe the turning would stop
The cracking would clean up itself
Without me having to write a poem in hypotheticals
Without having to pretend
But wishes aren't meant to sustain us
Their coins only collected to clink when we need a
sweet sound echoed back to us
A trigger for our lungs to fill themselves up again
But until then,
You must find some joy in the work of illusionists.
And find truth in your view of the sunlight,
No matter how far up the well you still have to climb.
