You Asked Me to Write You a Poem
And I always said I would
But never got around to it
I remember how desperate I was
To stay with you a little longer
And lying to my dad to do it
And how you made me laugh;
Suddenly I became somebody different,
Somebody who threw their head back
And begged for a kiss on the neck
You made me feel like an object,
Fell in love with my eyes, and hair and legs
But did you ever love my passion for politics,
For my skill with wielding words,
Or my thirst for knowledge?
You told me you loved me
And I said it back
Like a parrot
Who doesn’t look for truths
But just for noises
That can be echoed easily
You said you would do anything
To make me love you
But did you ever consider
That all I needed
Was to know that you cared,
That I wasn’t just fresh meat
Or a new hobby
But when I finally woke up,
From the trance that you put me in,
By being called ‘stupid’
For the last time,
You told me you didn’t mean it
That the words were hollow,
That they were without meaning
But what about all the other words?
You asked me to write you a poem
About us, about love
But poems are meant to be beautiful
And we were, my God, we were
But in the way that humans
Love tragedies
And watching destruction
Or something with perfect purpose
Not having a form to carry it out
And when I finally said ‘no more’
You told me you cared too much
That it was your fear holding you back,
That you loved me for more than my body,
And not just because you needed a new hobby,
That you loved politics too
And writing
And learning
And that I wasn’t stupid at all!
But I no longer needed your approval
Because love is supposed to be fearless
It’s about the ‘us’
Never just the ‘I’
It’s about waking up at two in the morning
Feeling your partner’s warmth beside you
And wondering how you got to be so lucky
It’s about sharing your time with someone
And accepting the differences you have
Because that’s what will get you through
You can sit there with your friends
Eating shrooms’, drinking “tea”
And tell them that falling in love
Is something painful and crazy
And that you were so obviously the victim
Because I was the one who walked
But somewhere deep inside of you I hope
You know the truth
That you did exactly what you cried about
All those months ago
When I told you the story of him
And the past that I ran from
Straight into your desperate arms
Spread perfectly like icing
On a cake
I was like a deer on a highway
Forgetting that trucks
Aren’t forgiving
Like the branches of a pine are
And although the trees hurt,
The truck kills
I wish I could tell you
How many hours I’ve spent
Thinking about the good days,
About our entwined limbs
And that bedtime story
Or how we secretly held hands
Under the dinner table
Even though we both despised
How cliché we were being
But if I told you
Then you’d have something to cling to
And you could never live on
Because my secret of letting go
Is not forgetting or forgiving
But finishing what I started