Work Text:
because the earth we’ve been looking for has been beneath our feet this entire time;
because the defined space that was supposed to be love, defined
was always framed by the brush of your shoe against my ankle, and the circle closed
by the encouraging hand on your shoulder that was mine.
(these are just the thoughts i’m thinking when you’re beside me
enraptured by a scene at the theatre or a spirited debate;
while you give all of yourself to what lies before you, i retreat inside
basking in the fuzziness of belonging, not the novelty outside.)
because any class will teach you that you never start a thought with “because”
and “and”; that one is especially bad. but poetry, even freeform, has rules like
developing a theme from the first sentence and setting the scene like a dinner table.
because they say i’m the type to make love to rules and give obedience at any price
but the fact of the matter is that love is always in media res because, yet and despite.
sometimes i will want for the slide of your arm across my shoulders and then i realise, oh;
it is already there.
(charity and grace and the restoration of god to her throne are the last things i care about.
i like things like justice. shortform beauty and longform arguments.
you’ll be lining your eyes while you accuse me of post-hoc ignoratio elenchi
and i will tip my head back to listen. because, yes: you are the beauty and argument i like.)
i am not going to wait for the end of my life to look back and discover what i ultimately wanted.
you can call me dull and ignorant to all social cues. you would be right.
but when there are a dozen moments in every day where i am humbled by the fact that i am yours
i am not foolish enough to ignore the obvious.
some men are waiting for a divine messenger to deliver unto them their life’s purpose.
i will be the man who takes the sword and cuts the angel down before they ever arrive.
(i know what i want. i need no reminders otherwise.)
and there will always be the people who swindle and lie and contradict what is good
just to bait people like you, the fair ones, to beat it into their heads that we are fallible.
and there will always be people who find a mirror of themselves in the wild
but i will be the only one to seize you, my chiral counterpart, because i am not afraid
to know i am the selfish kind, ready to take you and keep you for myself.
(because no thought should ever start with because. because we want the chaos of the world to be
simple and infallible. pretend like poetry is a steady stream of thoughts leading to a lake.
never leave a thought hanging. keep consistent your tense and your case. never break these sacred rules.
but You were so infuriating and You are an incomplete thought all the time and tomorrow You
might be my spouse or my husband or my wife.
how am i supposed to encapsulate You into a neat, composite sentence?
what we Are is Evolving ALL of the Time)
i hope we’re together for years and years. i like my consistency.
love is a choice i make every morning, and shame is for the weak. shame is for the weak.
i don’t want to kiss you. i don’t want to touch you. but people aren’t poetic prose or stanzas
confined to a book. if you wear a look on your face that says you want to touch me,
or if the thought strikes me [like lightning catching fire to a bush on the mountain high]
then i am going to kiss you and i am going to touch you. that doesn’t make me a liar.
we are not stanzas in a book. we are people and we are what we say we are. and i say
i am a lightning rod and you are a thunderstorm. we are evolving all of the time.
(so perhaps situationally speaking the stimulus can get overwhelming and i can find my mind overheating
and what was a lively debate between us becomes a tragedy. the words won’t break
free from my throat and you’ll just be holding me, trying to figure out if i’m mad at you.
or perhaps if we scale back down from eternity you will see i have so many moments where merely existing
is a labour of heracles and i am not that strong. this is what i mean when i say i am feeble:
an avalanche of little things can destroy me and seal my lips even when i am desperately thinking
of all the things i should like to say.)
because you call me irrational or say where did that come from when i announce over breakfast
that i’ve been thinking of bending you over the table. or, more simply: i’ll say that i love you.
sometimes you think i’m a saboteur trying his best to catch you off guard. in actuality,
these thoughts sing to me from the bog of my mind and they can’t always fly free.
and then occasionally, situationally speaking, you’ll be listening to a spirited debate
your arm looped around my shoulder, and i’ll be thinking poetry
always taking the meandering path to say that i love you. because i love you.
because I Love You is a complete thought, and all of those words deserve to be capitalised.
(according to all known parables of creation, there is no way a man should be able to be satisfied.
his heart is too capricious to get his fat little ego off the ground.
the man, of course, is satisfied anyway.
because this man doesn’t care what people think is possible.)
because the ways to say i love you
are evolving all the time.