I have no love poems to give you.
All I have are sheets of mosaics
Made from shattered glass,
Pieces of me I tried to will whole again.
Line after line,
I write, and I write,
Attempting to stitch myself up
With this pen.
I have poems documenting every heartbreak I’ve ever experienced.
I have poems describing every fucked up thing in my childhood.
I have poems detailing how I got better but never good enough,
How loving myself isn’t the cure-all for what ails me,
How I just find new ways to feel broken.
I have no love poems to give you,
Because I gave the words away with my mouth and my body,
Before I could capture them in ink.
They line the trashcans of every boy I tried to make a home of,
Like a raven's nest left undisturbed and unread.
I thought they would come back to me.
I thought if I loved myself and I gave some of me away,
It would come back.
I thought that if I freed myself from my imagined sins,
The things that haunt me would go back.
I thought that if I learned to love myself,
Someone would learn to love me back.
So, I have no love poems to give you.
I don’t know what true love feels like
Except to set myself on fire for a boy
Who will only baptize me in gasoline.
All I have are ruins of a sunken city
Damp from salt water and unrequited feelings.
All I have are memories cast in silver
Rewatching the plot twists to find the foreshadowing.
All I have is a beaten-up tornado shelter
Rusty with age and too much use.
All I have are two hands and two feet
That keep on reaching and progressing,
Believing that there is something better.
Even though I have no love poems to give you,
I am not saying I don’t know how to love.
I’m saying that maybe I’m bad at love,
And maybe I’ll never truly feel loved,
And maybe I haven’t changed much since
I left my mother’s womb, flailing in a world I don’t know,
But I do know that I’m not afraid to love.
I wear my heart on my sleeve,
My own badge of honor for all the battles fought and lost.
I polish the dust off, and proudly show my scars,
Unafraid and unapologetic.
“I love you,” has never felt like a curse to me,
It always felt like a prayer,
Every penny I’ve ever thrown into the well
And every wish I could never tell.
When I say, I love you,
I mean that I would move mountains
Just to catch a glimpse of your sunrise smile.
That I would dive to the bottom of the ocean
To pick you up when you’re feeling low.
That when you cannot stand on your own,
I will still these flailing arms and hold you
For as long as you need me to.
And when you don’t need me, or even want me,
I will still be here too.
When I say, I have no love poems for you,
I mean that I won’t have time to sit down and write
All the ways you make my heart hum,
That all my metaphors were used to exorcise
All the demons in my house to make room for you.
That all of my poems are about trying to be the man
Who feels worthy enough,
And knows he deserves to be loved.
And when I say, “I love you”, I mean
Thank you for leaving me speechless and my hands steady.
I could never write a love poem better
Than the one I will wake up to when the sun rises.
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
prguitarman
