Tight rope walking
is an art that my man
has perfected.
He sweats only inside
as he risks the fall
in bringing my morning coffee.
No net.
Still he smiles as though
this particular rope
is a lifeline.
A tether?

He could never be
The Boy With The Hair.
No;
My Man Is No Boy.
He dares greatly
clutching a quivering
cup of lifeblood.  
One foot placed carefully
In front of the other
50 feet above
the DMZ each morning
Into enemy territory.
Into me.

The bravest Man I’ve known
is a performer in a circus
where the perks are
landmines
languish
and breakfast with
The Bearded Lady.

Once upon a time
I bought a house from a guy
that looks a lot like you
-the type with an honest face.

To be fair I wasn't a hard sell.

He never had to ask me to ignore
the leaking sink,
or the door you had to shut
a little too hard.

I never needed sold
on the messy neglected interior.

I was hungry
for a home

An easy commission check.

I never asked about the interest rate,
or the property taxes,
or what it would cost to insure the place.

No thought whatsoever
about the blood, sweat, and tears
it would cost
Each Month
to pay the mortgage.  

Just to keep it.
Just to stay.

My brow,
and eyes
and cheeks,
raw from the salt they'd come to know.

A bad investment.
Bad negotiations.

I took the long way home.
I'm so glad I made it though.
Thank you.

I can never unremember discovering how much we both loved 3eb
that day in your bed at the yellow house.
Maybe that’s when I should have known
that I could never have you.
You knew that before I did.
I'm the one that's
Stupid.
And there’s still this
BURNING.
Like there’s always been?
I’ve always felt so alone.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever felt
Alive.

Do better!
Be better!
Want me!
I screamed into the void of my thoughts.
I wasn’t sure who I was screaming at
but I had at least a few people in mind.

The reality is:
it could have been anyone.
No one had ever been enough.

I had always believed that I had not been enough for anyone.

The trouble it seems:
He was right.

No one had been enough for me.

Maybe I was my intended audience.
****.

It’s the t-shirts on parade
and imagining that the new girl feels bad for me.
It’s that the new girl isn’t the new girl
but that she is the girl.
It’s that I wasn’t ever actually the girl
and she will never know the significance of each shirt.
It’s the feeling that I will only ever be a footnote
in the partners I’ve shared.
The feeling that I won’t ever be the headliner
only the one that came before or after.
I've got great taste in t-shirts though.

I love you and I used to could talk about it
But now it feels like manual labor
forming orders inside my mouth.
I want to say “when did it all come to be so hard?”
But it has always been this way, hasn’t it?
reasons Reasons REASONS
For bizarrely monogamous reasons
it has always been hard to talk about the way
I love you.
We were married and that was
reasons.
And then we were married but IN LOVE and that was
Reasons.
Then we were divorcing and HURTING and that was
REASONS.
And now we are friends and have all new
ReAsOnS

“Emotionally Impregnated”
was the phrase that came to mind
when I tried to make sense
of what had happened to me
half way through listening to
the song he had sent

“You know you gave me all the time
Oh, did I give enough of mine?”

It was the unchangeable joining
of thought and feeling that produced
within me a growing emotional experience
that no more asked permission to be
than did any other seed and egg.

“Say you don’t know me anymore
But that’s a bullet on your floor”

I have never been a reliable narrator though
how many negative tests have I produced
even amid ******* that imagined they were swollen
nausea that persisted for days
and blood that stained sheets much later than expected?

Had I just spent the last two years
in an elaborate emotional pregnancy scare?
Had the joining of lyrics
of hungry bodies
of insatiable hearts
produced within me an embryo of empty hope?

Have I sabotaged my own lifeblood
in a desire to force from my womb
some monstrous and malformed product
of what had been lifegiving friendship?