poemsonpoems

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I want to know who you are. A mirror separates us with a hole cut in the body. I swear I saw you in a friend the other day, her face plastered with joy. The flash of your smile in a crease-like wrinkle, like we’re made of paper, the origami type. I hear your voice in the wind, and I’ve never touched you. Though, somehow I know I can imagine, inaccurately, because in a dream I felt it. I believed it was real. 

  I now search far and wide for the scissors that once cut you in a separate search for likeness, or opportunity. One of the two, I long for something in common, I want the opening, but all I am faced with are stitches, sewn into newborn skin. Loneliness is an epidemic, and I know what it looks like. Your face is heavy with it; anyone could spot it from miles away. Anyone with a gift.

Although you don’t have what I need, I search for the outline of it in your pockets while I flaunt my hands in mine. Shadow puppets in the form of food and water to a starving man. I want to lure you with bread made from a rock. Since the first time I opened my hands to you, I couldn’t tell what you saw. I felt blood seep out, beating with my heart, and I’d hoped you would mistake it for something beautiful. The darker the chocolate, the more bitter it becomes. So how did it taste so sweet?

I could never unlearn how to taste it, falling flat on the floor of my sinus. So small and unwanting. Closer and closer, rising to the soles of its feet, it cries for the closeness that only I can provide.

“I felt the same as I did the first time. You know, first time I, uh, did it.”

Tirelessly trying to explain some sort of reasonable excuse for this unmanageable illness. I really felt the same. To learn it was not a one-time object, a single-use needle. Which meant to me, it could be recycled, repurposed. I could’ve wished that it was the same thing it was when it was laid upon me. New, once unfamiliar. It still starts me like a car, I rev and grumble each breath it gives me. In other languages, you can hear what I ask of you, but in this one, it sounds weird. The silence between us at this table is more than I could have ever wanted, but it’s more than I can bear. 

I’m not hungry anymore, and we’ve been sitting at this diner for what feels like hours. I’ve been chewing on the side of my cheeks, which seems to be tastier than any other food they serve here. My throat feels too tight to swallow more than this.

  You opened your mouth to talk, and a breath I didn’t know I was holding had escaped me. You closed up, and I hid my face in my hands. The moment you bit your lip before speaking, I knew there was a weapon waiting to find the crack in the door to hurl toward me.