I wish I could still get away
with telling women who like my dull eyes
that if my arms broke off,
if my knees finally balanced my heavy body
with two swollen bags of broken glass,
I’d still find a way to come see them dance.

Or they could just sit there,
and marvel at how stupid I choose to be.

Old tricks are for shoes covered
in dog shit and cement. They see right through me
just like that.

I could lie forever about things,
like what year it is,
how many hearts I broke on purpose,
or how much hockey I played as a kid,
and it would be the same as holding out my palms
while swearing my stories are a lot more compelling than the truth.

It’s easier to tell the girls all over town
that I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love
the fiction I wish I’d written first.

I love unrealistically for brief periods of time
that could travel on into the past a lot more slowly
if it wanted to.

Not enough to be able to make my way to their humorless embrace,
through anything worse than rain that comes sideways with the fury
of another nearby city declaring war.

Don’t expect me to come back from the dead.
That’s the kind of thing people who don’t fear stairs can do.
Don’t ask me to steal prescriptions with universal appeal.
I don’t trust anything that makes me accept being so tired.
Don’t tell me I’m going to be okay when I ask you to.
It hasn’t done me a bit of good in ten, fifteen years.

Don’t imagine that I will survive all the helicopters
crashing around in my mind,
just to hear you singing from the bathroom.

That’s the kind of thing that I wasn’t good at
even when I could hold my face in my hands,
and tell people how it had been a long, ugly Monday,
and that I’d never come back from vacation were it up to me.

I can get through supermarkets
with blood on the floors of every necessary aisle.

I can live with being forced to have a birthday to celebrate,
every time I’m brave enough to take out the trash.

Just don’t hold your lovely, necessary breath
for anything that would turn the color of your eyes to ash.

03/05/2013

Posted on 03/05/2013
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