Torch
Five years and 30 poems.
A ten year friendship and every ounce of self respect
I’ve accumulated as an adult.
This is what it’s cost me to love you,
to keep it quiet, then watch in horror as it was exposed.
It was left there to breathe and be toyed with
quite often between years one and three
before you decided it could be closed,
but should remain slightly ajar
which became the part of me that always hoped….
I can’t think of a better analogy than carrying a torch
while I attempt to explain these years of my life
but I wish there were better words, more dynamic imagery
and traumatic associations, something so all encompassing
and spot on that I would never have to write whine fest number 31.
My heart was breaking for someone else
the night that we made love.
That part of me that once would have given
both arms to be where I was
had become a dormant cell,
a person buried and a dream left to sleep
too long to acknowledge its fruition.
I would do so many things different
or maybe I would go back and not have done it at all,
every day is a wrestling match
and now my heart breaks for you
like routine maintenance that may be rescheduled
but never canceled.
This thing I carry has eaten through my hands
but I am saving the ashes like severed parts
that can be reconstructed in case it is ever dropped.
Now, picture a grown woman hobbling with a torch
between her wrists and weary arms,
thinking to yourself,
“GOD, why doesn’t she stop??”
