Dear Poetry, Each A-Muse

Dear Poetry,

this life has been a learning of what you can't ask for/ like i can't ask for the safety of other people to touch me/ i can't trust anyone to be near me for any reason other than their own absorption/ i watch other people navigate the space of relationships/ where someone cares if you get home safe/ where someone thinks of you throughout the day/ where someone really wants to know you/ and no one wants to know/ except you, poetry, where we travel/ or the dead who keep us never alone/ or the way even when i don't want to/ and i never want to/ that's the trick of it/ don't want to know before knowing/ it's over before it begins/ don't want to read scenes so clearly/ i don't need you to explain/ don't need you to context/ i don't need to be more than 6 inches from you/ and scented i can smell where you break/ what you hide/ what you take/ there is a-nothing hiding from me/ so i can't swallow/what hurts most/ the minute i am happy/ in the space with you/ the minute it rises up from inside me/ and what you don't realize/ is long before days later of abandonment/ i read the regret inside you/ i read the fear and doubt/ your own insecurity/ the confusion of being not enough/ of wanting a back to sleep life of repeat necessary/ who can blame you/ i don't as you tamper it back down/ unconscious of your own designs/ i play nice/ act like nothing's happened/ and walk to the car/ there is the life we lead surface sided in our bodies where almost two more weeks go by before you leave/ but for me, inside the energy of what broke/ i tightrope the unreality/ barter the borrowed time of slippery joy/ it's all i know of tenderness/ a stolen object/ not designed for me/ not made for my hands/ i scavenge what i can/ i horde what i know isn't even a shadow of what i imagine/what exists inside a space of ignoring what is true is what i call care/ but close as close i museum this land that wonders/ we look like anybody else who has someone/ and i can pretend/ poetry keeps me caught in plenty/ i can imagine a just about anything i will never know/ the best part of other people is never what they are/ but the lesson they give


sometimes i think enough.    


but you don't care how much it takes.


-
M

Dear Poetry, I Draw Damage

Dear Poetry,

I draw damage to me. No matter how the story starts, ends some same. Now when they close in on me, I play how long till I can see you for what you are. The poem I wrote last week has a hole in it. When I look at it taped to the wall, the white space is screaming. It's my heart. It's the wrecked space of what it should be. Or it's the warped space of what it has become. It is so quiet between the end of one word and the next syllable sharpening.                                                                                                              What they give me is silence. and what they don't know: I have enough silence to fill lifetimes. I say thank you anyway for the lesson and keep to the page. Come here where you tender. I pay the fee to cross with what I break apart, how artful to come asunder. You never say you love me, which is safer than all lovers who say it and not one meaning. They think they can handle language in front of me, the way they think they can handle me. We are inside one another, and I don't need to hear you coax me, love. When I wake up, the poem is on the wall, the hole in the text is visible across the room, the guesswork is gone and my heart doesn't have to wonder where you'll take me. There's no hope for girls like me. We signed off & what you get is a revolving door of lovers where only half are even good for a poem. It takes an incredible amount of damage to make it sing; I never tire of packing my bags to wander. I will go so far for you, so far under: Can you see how the light dances. I was trying on this narrative of being human for you; it's been nothing but disaster. I'm near the edge looking for escape routes, but we all know you took death's caress from me too.


Megan