Love Poem Medley Part 2
Sometimes everything seems fake to me, and I am so tired of people acting like they remember what love is.
Everyone says it.
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
No words are more meaningful to me when sailing from the lips of a true friend or a kindred spirit, but the rest of you have to be careful where you point those syllables
because that’s like taking the closest thing to
the Lord’s name that I ever understood
in vain.
I was walking back from the gas station a few weeks ago and some girl I didn’t even know looked at me and said it.
Her lip gloss opening and closing like some kind of sea creature fishing for plankton, and I just happened to be the nearest thing drifting past.
“Love you!”, like it was hello.
Now I have just one question
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN”
You have no idea what I am.
My smile’s like this because my parents had the money.
My eyes are not the windows to my soul.
They don’t mean jack except for genetics that I had no control over, and what my mother ate when I was in utero.
That’s like acting like my poetry is who I am.
Like how myelinated the neurons in my linguistics center
I can feel the right to decide that I am more or less, valuable.
It happened again earlier too.
I was sitting on the greyhound back home, having a conversation with a girl with guys all around her like fire ants with their mating tubes out. All of them with ink, piercings, and sizing me up
because my six-foot-four stature could not speak for itself.
I’d like to think we talked about something more important than my assets and destination, but as she turned to disappear out of the bus with her escorts, she cast the three words back on me
like throwing a fishing line on the off chance something might bite,
“I love ya.”
….what in the world.
After this, I think of the only one whose words held their weight.
I don’t mean no harshness,
but if I could go back in time and have half the balls my poetry does, I’d take you aside, and tell you something you wouldn’t understand. Something like, “BAM! I am a tulip field on fire at sunset.”
Something like, “My shirt, is from the Goodwill.”
Something like, “You’re telling me Christ could have saved the world with His cheekbones?”
“You’re telling me I’m viable and worth a few minutes of your attention?”
“You’re telling me tall, black, and attractive is what’s in this century?”
But let me tell you.
You don’t have any idea of the size of the planets you’re saying you want to try and swallow when you say those words to me.
I’ve been waiting to be able to hear, feel, taste, smell, and know those words for too long. You have to mean them to say them.
But you see, I was a philosopher before I was a poet, so I have to take that back and reflect it on myself.
The truth is, I’m so confused that sometimes, I don’t know which end my head is at.
Poetry flies in my eyeballs that should never make it past my lips, but I’m getting tired of trying to impress people.
In this past month, I’ve been day dreaming about the girl smiling at me and it meaning more than
“You look like you got good genetics”
Or
“Could I please date your self esteem?”
I’ve been day dreaming of the girl who reminded me of what those three words are supposed to mean.
Like when my acne came back, and you told me not to scratch at a handsome face.
“I love you.”
Like when my poetry departs, and all I can do is ramble things too big for my head.
“I love you.”
Like when I didn’t feel like just a romantic stereo type anymore.
“I love you.”
What those words meant to me, before I made the world make them less.
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