Maybe
by lena

You ask me why I’m watching you,
corner-of-my-eye style, and all I can offer is:
You too pretty to look at? And maybe that’s it.
Maybe that’s exactly it.
It’s always been moth-to-flame with you.
The poet is burning; the subject burns.
Maybe you’re exactly it.
Because I can’t write for anyone else, of course,
because I don’t know how. Because I’ve
forgotten how to write for anyone else.
My notebook paper curls at the edges, blackened,
and my poetry is getting more desperate.
But you write, of course, and you think, and you exist.
Not for me. Not only for me, not specifically with me.
You in plural. Every you exists, maybe, for
someone else. For some particular else,
whom I do not know, because the thought of me
maybe doesn’t go that far in, into wherever
the deepest ones go. I don’t sparkle.
I don’t shine. I’ve lost that, or maybe,
maybe I’ve forgotten how to shine.
Compare me to your light, to someone else’s light,
and maybe I will always be lacking.
I can only ever guess, and I am disadvantaged,
marginalized, because of the guessing.
There is only one of me, after all,
and she is in hiding. She’s exiled herself to the back
of my eyes. And she blames herself for this.
She’s the type. She’s that kind of woman,
the kind to whom the blame naturally reverts.
Achingly flawed, and painfully lost,
and dreadfully unable to articulate any of this.
The you for me doesn’t tolerate her weakness.
She wonders for whom you do tolerate it.
Too pretty to look at. Only for me, for every me,
who is only one, to every you, who is so many,
for so many others. I wonder, maybe, if there is
any left for me at all.