The Lovely Runners

I hold fears that if I ever sustained any dynamic that felt like love

The arrangement may forever feel tenable

In the throe of the predecessor uncertainty of feeling safe

The house falling to cinders in a turn of a conversation

An evening bending into nothing how quickly

To ever be that dependent again to prefer the alone

Of never trying to fly

I thought bird girl might understand

I thought this was the changing of the guard, the fork, the pivot

To be here has left me questioning my totality

Feeling like she is feeling-less

I am nothing and as easily forgettable as every other woman has made me feel

I am drawn to question how patient I need to be

With her, with me, if it matters

If there is anything pleasant to hope

If the silence will ever crack into anything but damned anger

I want to believe in an interconnection in something greater

That was bringing us together and not scoff, not jest

But feel what I felt as if I mattered in this universe to grow

To know the goodness I wished to share with her as if that was worthy of these lives

I know the pain of digesting the indifference at my offerings

Spurns me into the atheist’s pit

Hoping the way out is that I already wrote whatever it is I needed to find my heaven

I pray it is her like my angel, but if it is another, then I pray to be whole enough to try

My worst perdition is the nothingness

Hell has always been the absence of an interconnected God to me

And so in this sequencing I feel in the crucible of my life

Love and fear wrestle in my belly

I am not sure which compels me to write each time I raise the pen

I want to believe there is a duality to these thoughts as if struggles will break

Into a request for the beauty of the self-worth I know I contain

As if my quest to feel it in my bones the whispers will seek me

These conundrums of the human spirit vex my mind in ten-minute side-swipes

Pressing slumber into helpless wake

As if for a man to ask for a sustained love in his life

 is just too much to ask

To have love without an Enron, a hurricane,

 a construction, an abortion, a pivot straight into a tree

would just be asking for too much

to just have a string of nights reading together on a sofa,

making love in a common bed without fear

she could just bolt at any moment

So lovely, too lovely to sustain

Bodies bound to run