POEM - Loop 288

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