Work Text:
poem ii: felt on the table (the way you snuck on me)
leave your temptations on the stairwell, under the filthy bulb of the overhead light, amongst the garbage bags. i’m talking to myself as much as i am to you.
(with graffiti and three red locks, the door is no pandora’s box, but i can pretend.)
(all boxes must open, but at least your hand was in mine when this one did.)
i carve at you with every text studied and every game played; let your walls chip with every kiss shared and every glimpse of something more than stone between us; catalogue all the ways you glow like a person instead of marble.
abysmal, your music taste. precious, your dancing. familiar, your scent. cautious, your touch. saccadic, your eyes. i hope that my hold is reassuring.
on what day did your eyes become windows instead of looking glass? at what moment did i stop recognizing the feelings lodged in my ribs? during which morning did i decide i wouldn’t leave you?
instead, you leave me. my throat coughs up rubble, my fingers count the days, then the weeks, until time crumbles, too. pygmalion mopes, abandoned in the ruins of his workshop, dreams of michelangelo scrapped. a matchstick fell for the candle it lit and now it’s surprised that there’s nothing left.
our friends tell me to snap out of it, and i snap back that my heartbreak is not the same as theirs.
i never realized all the ways a chessboard can crack apart. i’m talking about myself as much as i am about you.
(usually when i lose a game there’s still an opponent sitting across from me.)
(i will never know how falling in love looks on you.)