Showing posts with label exes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exes. Show all posts

3/3/23

AFTER READING OLD UNREQUITED LOVE POEMS - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

If I didn’t think it’d make me appear crazy still,
I’d apologize to you for having been so crazy then.

Reading the poems I had written about “us”
resurrected all that nervous heat, reminded me

of the insistent stutter of my longing,
how I could never just lay it out there for you.

The answer, clearly, would have been
no, thank you. But perhaps that tough line

would have been enough to salvage
all that was good and woolly about us:

your laugh, the golden ring I’d always
stretch a story for; the pair of mittens

we’d split in the cold so we’d each have
a hand to gesture with; how even now,

the paths we took are filled with starry wonder
and all that bright limitless air. I’m sorry

I could never see myself out
of the twitching fever of my heartache,

that I traded everything we had for
something that never ended up being.

But if I could take anything back, it wouldn’t be
the glittering hope I stuck in the amber of your eyes,

or the sweet eager of our conversations.
No, it would be that last stony path

to nothing, when we both gave up without
telling the other. How silence arrived

like a returned valentine on that morning
we finally taught our phones not to ring.

9/24/22

Next Second, You Were Gone - Randall Stephens

I heard about an old broken phone box
Where people would go to have imaginary conversations
At first, I found it foolish
And then I joined the queue.

When my turn came, I dialled your old number.
There was no ringtone, but I told you everything
and I waited in silence
as if you might respond. 

I thought I heard you breathe. 
Then I remembered they told me my life should go on. 
One second, you were here.

10/23/18

HURLING CROWBIRDS AT MOCKINGBARS - Buddy Wakefield

If we were created in God’s image
then when God was a child
he smushed fire ants with his fingertips
and avoided tough questions.

There are ways around being the go-to person.
Even for ourselves.
Even when the answer is clear
like the holy water gentiles were drinking
when they realized

“Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.”

I thought those were chime shells in your pocket
so I chucked a quarter at it
hoping to hear some part of you respond on a high note.

You acted like I was hurling crowbirds at mockingbars
then you abandoned me for not making sense.
Evidently I don’t experience things as rationally as you do.

For example, I know mercy
when I have enough money to change the jukebox
at a gay bar.

You know mercy whenever
someone shoves a stick of morphine
straight up into your heart.

Goddamn it felt amazing
the days you were happy to see me.

So I smashed a beehive against the ocean
to try and make our splash last longer.
Remember all the honey
had me looking like a jellyfish ape
but you walked off the water
in a porcupine of light, strands of gold
drizzled out to the tips of your wasps.

This is an apology letter to the both of us
for how long it took me to let things go.

It was not my intention to make such a production
of the emptiness between us,
playing tuba on the tombstone of a soprano
to try and keep some dead singer’s perspective alive.

It’s just that I could have swore you sung me a love song back there
and that you meant it
but I guess some people just chew with their mouth open.

So I ate ear plugs alive with my throat, hoping they’d get lodged
deep enough inside the empty spots that I wouldn’t have to hear you
leaving, so I wouldn’t have to listen to my heart keep saying
all my eggs were in a basket of red flags, all my eyes to a bucket
of blindfolds in the cupboard with the muzzles and the gauze.

I didn’t mean to speed so far out and off, trying to drive
your nickels to a well
when you were happy to let those wishes drop.

But I still show up for gentleman practice
in the company of lead dancers
hoping their grace will get stuck in my shoes.
Is that a handsome shadow on my breath, sweet woman,
or is it a cattle call in a school of fish? Still

dance with me. Less like a waltz for panic,
more for the way we’d hoped to swing
the night we took off everything
and we were swinging for the fences.

Don’t hold it against my love. You know I wanna breathe deeper
than this. I didn’t mean to look so serious, didn’t mean
to act like a filthy floor, didn’t mean to turn us both
into some cutting board
but there were knives stuck
in the words where I came from.
Too much time in the back of my words.
I pulled knives from my back and my words.
I cut trombones from the moment you slipped away.

And I know it left me lookin’ like a knife fight, lady.
Boy I know it left me feelin’ like a shotgun shell.
You know I know I might’ve gone and lost my breath
but I wanna show you how I found my breath to death.
It was buried under all the wind instruments
hidden in your castanets. Goddamn. If you ever wanna know
how it felt when you left, if you ever wanna come inside
just knock on the spot
where I finally pressed stop

playing musical chairs with your exit signs.

I’m gonna cause you a miracle

when you see the way I kept God’s image alive.

“Forgiveness is for anyone
who needs safe passage through my mind.”

If I really was created in God’s image
then when God was a boy
he wanted to grow up to be a man.
A good man.

And when God was a man - a good man - he started
telling the truth in order to get honest responses.
He’d say,

Yeah, I know… I really should’ve worn my cross.
Again. But I don’t wanna scare the gentiles off.

That is not what I came here to do.
He said,

I’m pretty sure
I just came here to love you.

2/10/16

Remember How Sad That Was When - Paul Guest

I missed sadness because I no longer missed you,
how emotionally counterintuitive it was
as my citizenship in the nation I made of you
gradually lapsed. I woke some other
place with lakes and blue skies and rush hours
and strangers I worried about. But no you.
No ages of you. No your name three times
when I walked somewhere or lay down at night
to bargain with sleep. No you
falling from my mouth everywhere I went.
No you anywhere to be seen.
A secret to keep. And mostly I did,
even beside other women who asked
with the privilege of their bodies
if you had ever existed and what did you do
and did you have a name I’d share
and had you been good to me
but I never gave you up. I left the last of you
to be lost in the fog inside me.
Napping in bomb craters, haggling
over debts I couldn’t deny were mine,
memorizing every month’s horoscope.
It seemed then the days
you had left me stained in sadness
were like that. Good apples on back order from God
and the steaks full of blood
you taught me to love, rationed.
At least I told myself this,
thinking of all the never you were.
But there were limits and lengths
and limits again. There were
songs inside the fog inside the world.

12/11/15

Habits - Nikki Giovanni

i haven’t written a poem in so long
i may have forgotten how
unless writing a poem
is like riding a bike
or swimming upstream
or loving you
it may be a habit that once acquired
is never lost

but you say i’m foolish
of course you love me
but being loved of course
is not the same as being loved because
or being loved despite
or being loved

if you love me why
do i feel so lonely
and why do i always wake up alone
and why am i practicing
not having you to love
i never loved you that way

Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

SONGS FOR AN ENDING - Theodore Spencer

                      1

Goodbye, goodbye my darling,
Goodbye to all our past.
Love that hovered trembling
Has sprung away at last.

But Oh before that shudder,
Before that final spring,
The towering of his glory,
The splendor of his wing!

                     2

The quiet and usual word
We took for granted,
The word we wanted
And always heard,
Two vowels, two consonants,
The female and male word
Monosyllabically one
That was our union --
The word 'Love' has fallen
Most suddenly apart,
And my hampered tongue
Lacking the vowels it wants,
Stricken to consonants,
Speaks everything wrong,
Has no speech at all,
Has lost its calling,
The sweet vowels gone.

                     3

Now, my darling,
Oh now good-bye:
Love's wings are furling
In our present sky.
And we walk apart
Away from the other's
Abandoned heart,
While difficultly
The mind smothers
Grief for We
Become You and I.
Oh we walk slowly,
But forever, away
From the once half holy
Place of our day,
Knowing our love
Is done, is done.

Yet though we starve,
Braver alone.

                     4

"The longest love is this:
     To love and not to have.
To thrust love overboard,
     Makes love most safe."

I'd heard such things before;
     Foolish (I thought)
To save by loss.  But now
     I know it's not.

Oh lovers, learn that love
     Does more than drown
When thrust overboard; it forever
     Anchors you for its own. 

12/10/15

What I Should Have Said - MARTY MCCONNELL & EMILY KAGAN TRENCHARD

when you said that a wedding sounded
like something you could live with
so long as it was small
and local and not actually a ceremony
at all but a gathering
of some people we love but not
too many and not requiring
too much planning

I should have left you. should
have swallowed the velvet cushions
you leaned against, the ones salvaged
from the first couch my folks ever owned,
should have shredded the silk blanket
into rags, cracked my teeth
on the wood bed-frame, anything
but stay. love, you are the best

of my failures. how educated I've become
in the ways of silence. the woman
who follows me from room
to room in this new house has so
many hands there are not enough days
to fill them. when you did not

say no to the possibility
of a child I should never
have taken that for yes.
should have gathered
my ovaries like a fistful
of amaranth and run
all the way to Chicago.
who did I think we were.
who did I think
I could make you.

this is the oldest mistake,
to confuse wanting
with magic. silence is the undoing
of every spell, and we are experts
in the unsaid. even now, I forget
to put us in past tense. as if
the air in this city were the same.
as if love is anything like its speaking.

1/1/15

The Uses of Sorrow - Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.