What if no one else can read
the writing on your wall?
The gray bed is cold ash with a memory
It cries while pouring wine
from an empty bottle
Life from love was made upon it
One fool dreams of dying in its embrace;
another trophy for that shadow, ignored
We could live anywhere,
and yet we live here;
here, where very different versions of me
have wandered the streets
in search of that unmistakable purpose
which I feel with intensity every single time
you’re looking my way
The quagmire is that I’m a bird in a cage
—a tree with concrete roots;
I know you are too
The world in which we were breeze-born seeds
now seems so far out of reach that
I can no longer look in any mirror and
see myself without the many strings
of what else loves me
Cut a cord, it resents your absence
Maybe no love is ever truly free
Even the cat needs that daily fix of me
How do we abandon these circus crowds
for a quiet life of haunted lighthouses?
I’ve always been a man of many faces
Trouble is I fear that the world now sees
nothing but a clown, more in love with
the masks he willingly wears than he
ever was his own, honest face
But what no one comprehends
is that all of it is me
I’m a puzzle, misjudged by single pieces
Example: I want to love you deeply,
but I also want depths the likes of which
you dare not dive
How the hell does one tell Heaven
to meet them in the middle?
They rightly see a clown because
part of me is doomed to play the fool
A court jester could never be your king
King though I often am, let us not
go on pretending
I am happiest within my own head,
where no one stops me from owning
the fact that strangers may have
more to offer than anyone else I’ve known
For all your bluster of being realistic,
this simple truth, you take the long way around
And I’ve grown so very tired of pretending
that life would lose all meaning
if we left this town behind us forever
Because you force me to swim upstream,
and the stream will still be unbothered
long after even our bones have forgotten
where the current ultimately carried us off to;
just as it did with all of those
who weren’t wasted on fighting it
I want more than the struggle
Are you with me, or no?
Perhaps the vistas of our inertia
are what we were meant
to live long enough to see
But know that I intend to now see mine,
with or without the two of you