Have a Little Faith, Sweetheart
The softest gossamer gown is never welcomed
Where vodka jumps from tiny glasses
Jilted by sweaty grasps.
I am a flower that blooms morality,
A sober weed in a lush garden.
This penthouse party
Is a collage of mesh tops and darting eyes.
I saw the bar leaning on you for support,
Your blue eyes rolling back to watch
The easy elegance of
The serotonin transactions inside your brain.
The fire escape
Kept tripping you when you tried to run,
Didn’t it?
I did my damndest to help you,
But that cold black metal
Didn’t let you stand up straight for even a moment.
You seemed exhausted,
The way people seem to get when they search
And search for something they can’t find,
So I held onto your waist tightly
While you told me how beautiful I was—
How I could shine brighter than the sun herself.
I fell into silence on your couch that morning.
I tried not to.
I sang folk songs to myself,
I jammed the ridged lid
Onto the bottle of silver sleeping pills in my pocket;
They couldn’t kiss me they way that you did.
I slept anyway.
“I didn’t want to leave his drunken body!”
I yelled at my Mind’s figments,
“Put me back on my coiled steed!”
I woke up worried,
And you woke up depressed
Because you had lost a little more
Of that thing you couldn’t find the night before.
You disturbed the comic section
One, two, four times that morning—
To avoid that strange feeling you get
When you look down at someone
And still feel small.
In my dreams,
This is where we have incredible sex,
You buy me a waffle maker,
And we are every definition of “happy.”
But,
Because you walk away instead of dissolve,
Because we are not stranded on a desert island,
Drinking coconut milk beside our rescue fire,
And because I have enough taxi fare to get home,
I know I am awake.
So, dear boy, please wake up too.
Your dignity
Didn’t drown in alcohol when you were inhaling it.
Your smile is dulled, not dead,
And your elusive future?
That thing you can’t catch, you can’t see,
You can’t hold, you can’t find?
It’s been in your back pocket all along.
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