My friend Derrick says, "Love is the only war worth dying for."
But every time I say, "Please come back," I feel like I'm trying to find a dirty needle in a haystack.
And God knows--I can't go out like that.
I suppose we wear our traumas the way the guillotine wears gravity;
Our lovers' necks are so soft.
I lost my head so many times,
I got sober just hoping my eyes would dry;
Still I drink so much in my sleep,
I can't sleepwalk a straight line
To the guest room where collapse hangs so heavy inside her lungs;
She speaks and her voice trips across her heartbeat.
Each word limps into the air:
"We are gone," she says.
And I am no mortician.
I have no idea how to put makeup on the dead.
I have no idea how to un-erase,
So I just puddle at the door,
My face looking like a deck of falling cards,
Like eventhing's been playing me.
We tried so hard.
But when I said, "Give me a ring,"
She thought I meant a call.
Now I haven't had her number
For 3 years.
We've been saying, "How many times are we gonna
Keep cutting these red flags
Into Valentines?"
All the wars we've fought
Have turned our shine into rust;
Now we can't touch each other's trust
Without a tetanus shot.
We can't begin to remember
How we forgot
There is no shelter in the womb;
The heart forms long before the ribcage.
My mother swore she could feel me kicking
Weeks before my feel formed.
That's how hard my heart beat.
And it still does.
But they say the womb is where we learn love
Is knowing the chord that feeds you
Could at any moment wrap around your neck.
I hold my breath for the entire 56 seconds it takes her to walk to the window,
To stare at the road,
To tell me she has nothing left,
To tell me we are done
Carrying our level head
In our torn-up chests.
And for the first time,
I know she is right
As the dawn after our first date.
We were so young
I hadn't written an honest love poem yet.
I hadn't met anyone I could fall so hard for
'Till the night we kissed on our skateboards.
She teased me for going so slow.
I said, "I never want to catch up
To the letting go."
I want to plead in my throat to forever anchor my spine
In the seams of your warm slippers, love.
Even when the dove crashed through my window.
Even when our friends said, "You can call it love
But remember Einstein first called himself a pacifist
When he built the bomb."
When they ask me why we stayed together for so long,
I say, "I don't know."
I just know we cried at the exact same time in every movie.
I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know
I always stole the covers
And she never woke me up.
I know the exact look on her face
The first time she used my toothbrush.
The next day I brushed my teeth 40-some times because
I didn't want to let her go.
You have to understand
When it hurt to love her,
It hurt in the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night.
But I had to see,
Even through the ruin,
If what we were burying were seeds.
There were so many plants in our house
You could rake the leaves.
Even through that winter
When I was trying to make angels
In the snow of her cold shoulder,
She was still leaving
Love notes in my suitcase. I'd always find them
The day before I left.
I remembered a story her mother told me.
She said,
"Andrea, when Heather was a little girl,
She couldn't fall asleep without tying a string around her finger
That she stretched to mine in the other room.
All night long she'd give that string the tiniest tug
To make sure I was still there.
And when I tugged back,
That was love.
That was love.
Easy as that.
Sometimes."
Sometimes.