Author: Julian Shelnutt
I’m waxing poetic today
I can’t resist it’s what happens every time.
In a tizzy I get into the ideal you and me-
it goes a hundred ways.
I understand the concern with rain. Flooding, livelihood lost, basements gouged with twigs and sopped with water. But when something has been built up you start wanting to see it happen-
find me at the square dressed in black-
and you grow tired of the weather always being wrong-
I’ll wait for you there, come find me, let’s have coffee-
somehow it always ends up a little wrong.
There wasn’t even a scream as it happened.
I was dreaming of your garden days ago
I wanted to be led to see your hydrangeas.
I was hoping for your bedroom
but here we are.
I’m picking shards off of me and I
taste them in my mouth.
The broken glass is too dull to cut my tongue, but
judging by the way it melts
it was all bittersweet.
No more candles in the window for you.
No more time cut out for you.
No more physical relics made for you.
No more presence from you.
I wrest myself from love’s jaws, again, hurt twice more than last. I wonder, as my sides heave and give out to spasms, why I ever kept the fire in my chest; let myself fall into the passionate fire pit. Why did I like it like that?
What folly love leads us to fall into.