budro

it was strange; how broken you were before we even began
staring into doe eyes that reflected fish bowls;
lost souls swimming in circles looking for their partners

shopping in the clearance aisles for stress relievers and anti-anxiety medication
or perhaps just a really good sugar pill prescribed under your name
you know, that comfort that you try to give me you can barely afford

I try to not mind being lied to because you have eyes
that can't hide your star-crossed lovers from long before
whose amoration thrived on separation and melodrama
sweat and fluids running past thighs you'll never speak of again
breaking out in such a ruddy flush nearing rashes
that people thought you were allergic to each other's adoration

I'm alone, left lying between sheets
staring at spiders writing cob-web love letters on the ceiling
and listening to thunder crooning serenades to fickle lightning
(because real love can only last for a moment
before breaking that rumbling giant apart)

struggling against being a cliche, another love-struck statistic
listening to heartbeats sung by past lovers breathing in your chest
as you lightly exhale sheets of silk and velvety embraces

you are poetry putting together puzzle pieces with the precision of scientists
dissecting emotions with logic as if rationality
could make sense of something so counter-intuitive

poetry stained with the scent of raid
from attempts to kill the ants that constantly crawl over my skin
biting at flustered nerve endings whenever you're watching with

eyes that reflected cataracts your dog lost sight in long ago
golden retrievers that never made it back to their masters
sunset explosions and milky little deaths inside my body
loyalty misguided because sometimes,
I don't want you to bring back your old memories
(Did you know that even false ones
can cause someone to die of broken heart syndrome?)

and it is love like a lie as we lay here together,
piecing together solidarity in the solitude of our sheets
repeating love letters you wrote to past lovers parenthetically

with eyes that hide feldspar grains in the middle of iridescent moonstones
flashes of blue that peek through translucent linens
eyes like parentheses hiding gentle white lies lying next to me the morning after