Lonely Lovers
When we walked your hands swung slowly at your waist
Before you knew you didn’t need me
Balancing the weight of invitations
Writing just to claim to miss me
But never calling, never loving me
You said I was a girl much too needy
Too attached to you and your ephemeral faces
You said you never saw our future
Written through the clouds that shadowed over
Your Floridian night sky
You always said you didn’t need me
Strumming out suspended chords
Throughout the strings of your guitar
You always were a little heathen
Singing songs that bordered on depression and abuse
You never moved without an absence of an order
Haphazard decisions
Playing by a rule of going with the flow
You always hid yourself in bedroom alcoves
Treasured adolescence as a way to be alone
You called your friends and said you didn’t need me
And then you laughed at all the ways I managed my attack
One day you called me with an academic plea
And I was there to hold you recalcitrant as I set you on your knees
You said your life would never be in order
Well now with this I’ve made a life of you that you could never know
One day you called me just to say you wouldn’t need me
Dancing on a sphere’s periphery
Afraid to set your foot into its centre
Swayed by all your stupid friends who wake up
Dreamless, fill their days with one-off darlings,
Anecdotal divas, and a cup of rum to wash away their guilt
Always knowing they would never need us,
Never see a woman in her loyalty and wealth
You wax poetical whenever you are drunk
And when I fall towards inebriation
You take my shot and wash my fun away
Sometimes I wonder why I cannot leave you
And then you look and mutter
Something in a way that bothers all my senses
Captivates all my defences;
I watch you thrive and squander all your tears away
And then I sit as if I always knew I’d somehow need you
Through your boundless immaturity
And then I sit and waver
You buy me yet another month with one day’s conversation
And so my anger dissipates
Slowly for a season
Gradually weaning
Tacit understanding: you will always be there
Waiting for my love to float near infertility
Waging civil wars between my love for you
And all such practical considerations
Standing in a room beneath a stream of water
Weeping an invisible emotion caught up in a shower’s rain
Insomniac who cannot leave off breathing
Give it just another week
Basking in nuptial occasions that have always lined my dreams