Silverfuck
09-04-2009, 01:36 AM
This is something I've been working on all summer and have struggled with myself to finish. I don't suppose it will make sense to anyone but me, but I don't mind. It's been a labor of love.
The Book of Jonah
"What happened?" you ask,
and you wouldn't believe me if I told you,
because it reads like the worst brand
of low-grade melodrama,
too tawdry and trite for even
a teenage girl.
Words don't always work.
The truth is you read me like a book,
laid me out bare
a sans-serif skeleton in a bluebright sea
ticking down the moments between real life
and a life betterthan
where poems breathed
and the salamanders on the sidewalks moved us,
and Christ
I was scared.
You said it best:
it's like it wasn't there until we saw it,
catching it sighing from its dew-strung mantle
white and naked in the predawn glow
of psychonautic nightime wanderings.
It's beautiful and horrible, but the worst thing-
how it hangs in front of you
like the girl you've always loved
but will never fuck-
reminds you of a world that could be
would be
if you could only reach out
and touch it.
But we both know that we won't
and never would;
we languish in a trembling state
of arrested development.
preferring the poison we know
to the nectar we don't.
I could live with that,
could live a slow death, with talking
about Europe and true love
about exposed brick and a red-wine sky
and knowing that it would never come to pass:
We all have phantoms
and mine would be beautiful, poetic, at least.
But there was a day, once-upon-a-time
when I sat outside
till my fingers were numb with cold
and tore up a letter,
tossed its pale fragments like confetti to the wind
and cried for the hollowness of my intentions
my desire to save myself at the expense of anyone else.
That was the day I learned
that words have no master,
and me least of all:
My careful cursive and wishful thinking
looked up at me from between notebook margins
and spat in my face,
and told me to stop lying to myself.
I like to think that you understood, then.
And I'm hoping you understand now
that sometimes hurting a person
is the kindest thing you can do for them.
Understand:
that I can't bear to be who-
what- I saw, reflected in black lines
that moved like dark dancers
across the snow-white of my computer screen.
I never plead,
but I'm pleading with you now.
Because the truth is, you read me like a book
and showed me more than you'll ever know.
But I can't write myself
so unceremoniously back into your life,
Because the words don't work,
not like you deserve.
The Book of Jonah
"What happened?" you ask,
and you wouldn't believe me if I told you,
because it reads like the worst brand
of low-grade melodrama,
too tawdry and trite for even
a teenage girl.
Words don't always work.
The truth is you read me like a book,
laid me out bare
a sans-serif skeleton in a bluebright sea
ticking down the moments between real life
and a life betterthan
where poems breathed
and the salamanders on the sidewalks moved us,
and Christ
I was scared.
You said it best:
it's like it wasn't there until we saw it,
catching it sighing from its dew-strung mantle
white and naked in the predawn glow
of psychonautic nightime wanderings.
It's beautiful and horrible, but the worst thing-
how it hangs in front of you
like the girl you've always loved
but will never fuck-
reminds you of a world that could be
would be
if you could only reach out
and touch it.
But we both know that we won't
and never would;
we languish in a trembling state
of arrested development.
preferring the poison we know
to the nectar we don't.
I could live with that,
could live a slow death, with talking
about Europe and true love
about exposed brick and a red-wine sky
and knowing that it would never come to pass:
We all have phantoms
and mine would be beautiful, poetic, at least.
But there was a day, once-upon-a-time
when I sat outside
till my fingers were numb with cold
and tore up a letter,
tossed its pale fragments like confetti to the wind
and cried for the hollowness of my intentions
my desire to save myself at the expense of anyone else.
That was the day I learned
that words have no master,
and me least of all:
My careful cursive and wishful thinking
looked up at me from between notebook margins
and spat in my face,
and told me to stop lying to myself.
I like to think that you understood, then.
And I'm hoping you understand now
that sometimes hurting a person
is the kindest thing you can do for them.
Understand:
that I can't bear to be who-
what- I saw, reflected in black lines
that moved like dark dancers
across the snow-white of my computer screen.
I never plead,
but I'm pleading with you now.
Because the truth is, you read me like a book
and showed me more than you'll ever know.
But I can't write myself
so unceremoniously back into your life,
Because the words don't work,
not like you deserve.