Dear Poetry, You Don't Tell Me I'm Beautiful

Dear Poetry,

I wanted you to be some other kind of lover: a ledger of sounds lapping. You go off, I get off on the nerve of language where stringed you trip against smoothness. Snap baby, way you pucker up under the image: Sliding into your finger tips. Screen dream of make my grief holler, I'm willing to bet I can take whatever you have to give. When someone says, manage your feelings what they mean is: i don't, i can't, i need you to be smaller b/c i feel so small. I've lived too long to be scared, tempt me with the twinning of barb wire round my throat, silencing: that action ghosts me most. You never asked that much of me, you wanted to watch it go in. You wanted me to perform under dissection, the hollow of warring myself into a shape you would contemplate. I was in love with you before I was in love with a device I could hold in my hand. I was in love with you while other lovers tried to wear your face & shove their hearts inside. I was in love with you because you stayed but mostly you were all I could stand to have stay. And you used me as best as any, I had to jump, I had to fit, I had to follow your lead and what you took as payment for the boat ride was to never turn away: called it save your life and then save someone else's. But you wanted me under you, wanted me to fight my way up as you pinned me. I could take all of these beautiful dreams called other people and smash them into a narrative that colored this truth: My life like any life has been two choices/ you can make your way out of anything.

xoxo,

Megan