If I am at all intolerable,
it’s because I am in between reconciliation,
and choking on an apple.
I arrive at my slipperiness several times a day,
this dungeon has become all too familiar,
perhaps its stench has stained me,
and I reek of sin,
oddly an ever lucrative pheromone, or so it seems.
Why can they not smell it on me?
Why when all those years I’ve spent unnoticed do they now wish I was something they saw?
The more indifferent I was to them,
the wider their eyes became.
And deep in the pits of me I want to take a knife to their livers and make them suffer more,
“here,” I say, “taste your own bile, I’m already familiar with it”,
but those years alone not only make you outwardly cold and stoic, but inwardly abundantly empathetic and merciful,
so I smile and greet them instead,
with the same bashful innocence of a child who’s spent way too much time inside his heart,
inside his head.
I leave it all unsaid,
I resort to what I know best,
one step back, guard up and play rope a dope,
play hope a hope,
maybe, just maybe, someone will notice,
that I’m half in this world and half out,
and why I can give more of me at a tenth of who I am than others can with their full expanse, their full effort.
Even then, I have to filter myself,
water myself down as it’s too easy to fall in love with falling in love.
And echo on with war crys,
with quaking thighs,
with eyes and lies,
as we play this game of finders keepers,
allowing ourselves to be found,
allowing ourselves to be kept,
unkempt…. as it all may be,
some have less demanding needs,
a glance, an arm to lay on,
a kind word a moon apart,
anything, you can afford,
they sit like beggars at your door,
one more day, one more.
This poetry of dread and longing,
of insecure apetities that waver in and out of the bay of curling shores,
that can’t find its way through the swamp and withering of decay,
is all I have to offer,
the only oil lit niche in the wind of what does not and will not ever belong.
W.E.
lonerloaner 