Opposites Attract But We Are Not Magnets (Sestina)
Like East and West you rose when I fell,
was that all we ever were?
Two poles that tried our best to,
with smiles like puddles, fit together right.
As gum does under a wooden table,
We dried up and hardened.
Your expression, once radiating untouched youth, seemed hardened.
And once your brow furrowed your smile fell,
like a fussy babe’s milk from the family table.
Acquaintances are what we had become, what we were.
Finding any fault in you solidified my right
to curse your name so I could feel something too.
Then I marched you forcefully to the guillotine to
damn and release you. Since my heart hardened
I felt our love had lost its rights,
a condemned criminal who lost it all when his defenses fell.
We looked at the time, which was more precious to you, as it were,
and you just tapped your feet under my table.
I cried “enough” and turned the tables.
Your indifference towards it was all too
much considering what we were.
But my will had hardened
and we could never last, come Fall.
You kissed my brow softly before you left and nothing felt right.
My heart, on a seemingly straight path, turned right,
and was consumed, ferociously, with silver forks on a table
by my loneliness, which rose when we fell.
And then I cried, not many tears, just two.
Once the salt from my tears had hardened,
I reassessed my emotion and tried to forget what we were.
But the shadows in my room you left behind were
keeping me from believing that it would ever be all right.
And though, when I let go my resolve for your absence hardened,
as I watched you stroll away from my table,
I couldn’t help but think we should still be two.
Defeated hopes and desires had nowhere to go, so they fell.
But the distances between us were so much more than a kitchen table,
And the intentions could never be right or natural too.
So I will rise and gain my hardened place in the sky and you can wait to fall.
|