Unstable Ecstasy

-

poetry being the poor man’s soup,

I think I’ve tasted all I can of a bitter experiment

that drips like the brightest acid

down the pipe-throats

of every girl who’s ever loved and thrown herself away to it

because clouds just don’t take shapes anymore

and we’re all so sick of pretending.

That critical last line

can’t seem to breathe

despite the love of his perfect eye when you can’t tell

his smile from his insane hating cry

wrapped up in these letters that prove nothing but

a longing for mortality,

a dream of ever-lasting fortune in ends and

contradictions that say we cannot fly

though this wind smells sweet like rain and comfort in the noises made by breaths

so early in the morning

and he’s startling the girl though she thought she couldn’t bear to be alone

It’s really all she wants

she knows

these clouds just provide the rain we sip like our fate in poison

or this solid truth he and she cannot condemn

though hatred could be learned in time and loved like our smoothest lie

the one we write about for years

in liquid explosions of trust with color

like lives that

scream to be forgotten

in a hopeless, pitiful display of self-affection

what we really have to say

cannot be said

there are so many things to do and no melancholy listeners or drones who might stop for a delicately created muse

perhaps fireflies will drop down from that

frightfully labeled sky

with wings that glisten enormous

like the brightest glowing love at a party,

lighting up the same sky that snapped her beliefs in half

for lack of clouds that carry dreams and acid rain

(because one day

they just stopped soaring by)

and she tried to learn to fly like those kites the children send to the sky

that same goddamn indifference she senses from them is in the back of her mind,

coated in the most delicious fable

she took time to create one brilliant afternoon when she felt silence was too big a word

to fully swallow

and carelessness could never be forgotten when written in this permanent ink of vivid memory

scratched into her skin;

his name,

a dozen more just like it,

though he was the only one to make it to her grave,

regretful and so lacking in forgiveness

at least they still had Paris,

this memory bathed in romance

they secretly recorded in some beer-ridden party in the backyard

of his home with the award-winning garden

that just reminded her of France

as she tasted that kiss,

that bliss,

of unlimited, all-consuming levitating imagination

perhaps it just reminded her of cream-clouds,

those bloated disasters exploding before rain

narrated her self-pity game,

we’d all like to forget the drunken touches,

the fires that burned and glowed like torches for a moment

of unstable ecstasy—

what he really means or wants to give

is a matter of indifference beyond any trip to fabled romance,

and that bliss,

that kiss,

was never quiet and so easily forgotten as something she’d want to endure,

thinking so unclearly about weekend virginity

and the lost graves of future memories

even the sky would reject in the anger of a tornado, swallowing all but a package of identification,

a filter for those tears that are too heavy to cry,

And when Paris never happened, it’s all he can do not to run away first

from her indifference,

then secondly from her hatred which he says

he loves,

like love is just what is reflected in her goddamn eyes,

an image of a secretly lonely man

tattooed on a woman

he would LOVE to forget

(who has forgotten him already in the fashion of a secret)