Kerplunk

Maybe I wrote all these love poems

Because I wanted one in return so badly

Such a simple concept, lever of the universe

Fulcrum of energy type of deal

I saw in your masks what I wanted to receive

A human worth the receipt of another human’s energy

The invested effort of desire, of appreciation of presence

To lay down time in beads spun straw into words

Poet’s currency expensed in folded dough

Baked in heated letters rising inbox

That warm bath they gave you

Reciprocal all I wanted in return

The destructive force of sensing the appreciation, the bulb of impetus

Beginning to seed in you, not because I wrote

But because you wanted

Like light to stem after thirty consecutive winters

Your words were the hour after solstice

The break in the tide

The fulcrum shifting weight

For that measure of seconds breathing in me like that inch of dawn

I was a man beginning to fill his palms with blood

After holding his arms prostrate, seized and crimped

Hoping for notice that these bones were salvageable

You gave me a ray, a luminescent moment by the top of the stairs

Where I felt like I started to see you as a human being

Wanting me there and I weep in my bed at the beauty in that

Two and half revolutions of the sun later

Still in awe of the depth of how I thought I had found my person

Digesting the illusion, the gallery of costumes in pale skin

Not to harm me, but to preserve the routine of you

Cloistering me cold and wan in placid flour and butter oven-less 

Sterile unfolding this recipe crestfallen and flustered to drain

Days where to see that I pray there is no god, no taunt in this seesaw ambivalence

Thumping kerplunk in your indifference