Resurfacing
I remember writing about you.
I’ve been going through those old poems
like an embarrassing childhood in photographs.
It’s not my style to produce so much without some romantic gesture
at the crux of most,
but you were never asking to be the subject
and I can’t cite a single one that reads like a choice.
It was a rescue mission of sorts, for my sanity or my conscience,
maybe both.
People say I have a way with words,
but there aren’t enough in the whole of human intelligence
to articulate this unending affair of my heart in the silly pursuit of yours.
I can’t explain to myself why I’ve never outgrown these urges
I never had permission to explore.
The way your hair looks pulled back made me want
to bring your head to my shoulder with a curious hand.
When you wear glasses to drive, I find my eyes linger so long it is
more noticeable than other times,
I feel the temperature of my body spike and I’ll look away
until you start talking.
I have always felt vulnerable in your eyes and keep contact
to a minimum, careful not to broadcast to the room
that these things have never passed.
They’ll recede into the away hours
and seem to be gone, only to keep resurfacing
just as I am thinking they will not.
It would appear to be dormant or in remission
like some deceptive illness, then
I’d see you at her house every few months
or at the bar once a year for a birthday
and binge drink myself into a stupor
as if it my heart had slumped down to my liver
and could be killed.
How we met rips my heart in unequal halves,
the guilt and the pure truth alternate every hour,
the weight of both and your insistence that I choose
is making me feel that I have more to lose here
than in any other chapter of my life
and I cannot begin to describe that kind of fear.
I just want to start running and keep going until the cold air
begins to swallow my lungs and seize my pulse.
My head swells and shrivels in a locked debate,
I am tired of fighting myself but grown accustomed
to it’s turmoil and revolving tirade.
I’m not sure if it’s worse now or more interesting.
Sometimes I can’t sleep, replaying the night we spent together
and imagining the next.
It was safer when I had to imagine,
now I know shape and touch and taste.
I’m haunted by them in memory,
wanting to commit them to my hands and save tiny bits
beneath my fingernails like proof of a struggle
we both thought might have ended
before, resurfacing.
