You have prompted something in me
That I do not know if I have ever felt
And it frightens me to tell you this now
In our infancy
As if to call false as if I could not know
But something inside propels me to
Hedge on certainty rather than doubt
Fearing smothering or scaring you
Into undue pressure to match this
Level of interest and tempers my enthusiasm
Into the most painful bouts with patience
To not speak to you, to not see you
Exasperates my sense of focus
Into a mush-puddle of lost logic
Melting on the sidewalk
I want to know everything about you
This insatiable want to connect and to give
All of these days that I have lived
For you to know each one of mine and
In turn the yearn to see you in fourth grade
At dance class, riding in a caravan
The sleepovers the best friends and heart breaks
The dinners and victories and blind story mysteries
That mark your identity in all the fidelity
Of self that I wish might want me enough to tell
Me to keep asking, to seek the reciprocal in lasting
Bets on me to see me
On a bike at seven eating lumber
On a dance floor at sixteen staring blankly into a green dress,
Howling in a dragon’s den at twenty-one
A vagabond at thirty spreading open in flesh
And bathe in all my regrets to clean and rinse
All of this into a world you wished you had not missed
To spare me there to greet the stage as
Stepping stones on my pathway to you
And nothing else matters but a measure of
Do’s and do not’s, promises of trust
That come from these scenes in the tiniest of excerpts
Earned in grins within subconscious exchanges
Within playful parades of every day like keepsakes
Inside a threshold of time
Built up in inviting you into my make-shift home
To cook you dinner, to venture within you into the
New Orleans nights of trombones and French Quarter courtyards
Sipping on gin and whiskey talking about storm stories
School times and misunderstanding,
Seeing the rotation of your wardrobe
The applications of your I-phone
To tell you the stories of this past decade
Without reluctance of leaving potholes
Of some piece of me that in a future computation of truth
That missing variable would have assisted in explaining
The realities that swim inside me like an ocean of understanding
I want you to connect with and yet not feel
The compulsion to re-explain to you a past
I no longer wish to live in, but want you to have absorbed
Into the prefix of our relation
That you could weigh the silences and pressures
I have internalized for these sixteen months
The threats, the stripping away and endurance
To retain integrity in these tiny daily battles
Of unknowns and treacherous love
Integrity’s stamp in bone to marrow
To believe a purpose in this path
And to find the kindest of witnesses
To all that I have disproved by law
Yet confront in the silence of the deceased
And in the war-zone of my own daughters bartered beliefs
To be recognized in an emphatic love
To wash away this fault by default
Hardened to my arteries
And loosening in the waters
Of an impossible request for forgiveness
In your arms to release the man
I have never been able to be
To take on a role in my life, fostering a margin of error
I have never given myself the liberty to believe was possible
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