The Key

Dammit, where is the key to your heart?
I’ve searched forever for the reasons
for you to love me for just a day,
an hour, a minute, just to see you smile
when you see me, just to kiss you once.
But that key is just so hard to find.
I know there is some feeling in your lonely heart,
something for me, something that can feel
the same feelings that I have for you.
Girl, I just want to love you for a little while,
but I don’t mean this unreciprocated love
I have for you that will never die,
I mean a shared passion,
a desire to be close to each other,
even to just stare at the stars,
to close our eyes and pretend to be among them,
to listen to the sounds of our hearts beating together,
to hold hands and waste the night away,
just you and me.
I want to defy conventional logic,
prove that one plus one equals one, not two,
because all I’ve ever wanted
was to hold you close to me once
and fade into the designs scattered along your fingertips.
I want to wrap you in the blanket of fire
that burns in me, in my heart,
and keep you safe,
keep you warm on the coldest nights.
But the chances have run thin
and I’m running out of time.
Don’t say we could never work,
because you never gave this a chance.
I’m still searching for the key to that heart of yours,
whether or not this will forever be a hopeless pursuit.

Oh look, I found the key,
but you found him.
So I guess that makes me a lovesick, hopeless wreck
that will never be happy without you in my life.

#246                                               09-23-07

Gift From The Sky

My life had no meaning,
my path had no direction,
my mind never had clarity,
thoughts never made sense,
ideas never formed,
all hope was lost.
I was left in the dark hole
of my bottomless mind to feel nothing,
falling but never closer to the bottom,
numb to the outside world,
and I trudged through the lifeless gloom,
blind to everything that came at me.
On a perilous journey with no end,
alone, depressed,
I drowned in sorrow,
begging for the answers
to the endless questions called life.
But my mind, my thoughts, my quandaries
melted away when I saw your eyes for the first time,
and suddenly there was a bottom to where I was falling,
something I’d heard people define as ‘love.’
I felt your impact immediately,
a dizziness sweeping over me like mist,
a shortness of breath, heart beating faster and faster.
I didn’t know what your name was
who you were,
or where you came from,
but I felt like none of that mattered
as long as I could be near you for a little while.
Five seconds and I was yours,
ten more and I knew the feelings would last,
thirty seconds later I was burning inside from the passion,
and in a minute I was forever in love.
I wanted to hold you, listen to your heart beat with mine,
feel the fire raging through our hands should they meet,
and see it burning in your eyes when I stared into them.
There is no way to escape you,
not with such a deeply-rooted devotion in my heart,
not when you make me crumble with only a smile,
not when I can see a lifetime of happiness behind your blue eyes.
You’ve got me wrapped around your fingertips
and all I can do is hope that you’ll untangle
this mess of a young man one day,
take these shattered fragments of my life
and piece them back together, make me whole again.
I want to be with you for the rest of this life
and the next ten lives after that.
You mean everything to me,
plus everything you’ve ever meant to anyone else.
I couldn’t survive without you in my life,
because you brought me out of the hell that I was in,
and without you I’d be doomed to return there.
I need you to love me, to alleviate the weakness
in me when you aren’t near, to cradle this
fragile heart in your hands and never let go,
to share some of that ethereal presence
that emanates from you wherever you go,
because you are truly a gift from the sky.
And I swear on my undying love for you
that it’s the truth,
that I saw wings and a halo
the first time I saw you.

#245                                                                   09-17-07

All’s Fair

This is love.
I know it,
I feel it,
I want to share it,
but you aren’t willing
to receive it.
I can’t say I haven’t tried,
with every complement, every flattery,
every feeling that rushed into my mind,
with every time I looked into your eyes,
hoping to see an indication
that this was meant to happen to me.
However, though you say
that this love is an impossibility,
I’m not giving up without a fight.
This isn’t just a battle,
this is war.
This is my crumbling heart
against your quintessence.
My passion for you
against your lack of feelings for me.
My desire to be with you
against your desire to be alone.
My love against your restraint.
A door that won’t open
against a flood of feelings
rushing through a gate
that won’t close.
I’ll throw everything at you,
every passionate thought,
every poem,
every love letter left unwritten,
every fire burning in my body,
every feeling I’ve ever had for you,
coming at you from every side.
I will not rest until that door to your heart
opens wide, to let this passion fall in
and explode, to consume your mind
until the electricity flies through our fingertips
when we touch,
until I can feel your heart beat
in time with mine
when I hold you close.
I want to love you with everything I’ve got.
I want you to be there
through my triumphs
and through my tragedies,
and I want you there
when my last breath passes,
so that I can use it to say
“I love you” one last time.
And I will defy gravity if I have to,
I will make the impossible
seem like a walk in the park
if it will help me invade your heart.
Something’s gotta give.
Either the door to your love
has to succumb to the pressure
of this passion pressing upon it,
or the flood of feelings will fade,
the fires will die away
and I’ll be left with nothing.
If I can’t ever be with you,
if you can’t love me,
then kill me,
because I’d rather be gone
than to live with the pain
of losing such a powerful love.

#244                                                         09-12-07

Can’t Stand

A mound of feelings,
a pile of forgotten devotion,
sits unkempt in the corner of my mind,
like a pile of laundry
sits in the corner of
a college student’s dorm room.
I see you there, acting like nothing is wrong.
Don’t feign a blank expression.
You’re the one that shattered my heart.
You infected my dreams,
tainted my thoughts,
stole away my breath
and captivated my senses.
You were my world,
and now my world is nothing but dust
to be washed away by the tears of the sky.
The sight of you sends
cold chills up and down my spine,
and I shudder at the impossibility
that was, and is, my love for you.
How I want you still,
and at the same time
how I never want to be near you again.
To love you is a contradiction,
an emotional suicide,
exemplified by giving you my heart
only for you to destroy it with your lies.
But should I sew up and cauterize
the wounds in that broken, bloody,
beating heart just so that
you can rip it apart again?
I can’t stand how you entice me
with your eyes, showing me
the serene grassy glade
that is your own personal Paradise,
inviting in only those you choose.
I can’t stand the fact that
I’m not one of those chosen.
I can’t stand the fact that
you play games with my mind,
treating me as a toy,
a pawn in your grand scheme.
I can’t stand the fact that
you don’t care about my feelings at all.
But at the same time,
I can’t stand when you’re near,
because you make my knees weak,
and I fall for you again and again,
and so, most of all,
I can’t stand the fact that,
even though you treat me like
the dust that was my emotion,
my passion, my world,
something you can step all over,
sweep under the carpet and forget,
even though I couldn’t hate you more
for the pain you’ve caused me,
I can’t stand the fact that I still love you.

#243                                                     09-11-07

Reading

Reading?
Reading?
Are you serious?
Why do we have to read?
I don’t like reading,
not in front of people I don’t know,
and I just met you all two weeks ago.
I think T.S. Eliot is a safe bet.
“The Hollow Men”, that’s a good piece.
It’s not mine, so I won’t feel bad
if they critique the hell out of it.
Because they will, they’ll have comments
if I read my unedited,
straight-from-the-heart poetry.
I can tell, this is a group
full of critique,
or maybe its criticism.
Destructive criticism,
not constructive.
This group looks ready
to bite my head off
at the first sign of weakness,
the first sign of a lack of feeling
or emotion in reading my poetry.
No, they won’t hear it this week.
I won’t let them.
I’m not going to read it.
But I’ll read “The Hollow Men”,
that doesn’t require much emotion,
because the dead have no feeling
and neither do I, when I read poetry at least.
And after something like that speech about
having to relate to the poem, capture the feeling,
I know I’m not good enough for reading.
But I’ll tell you, there’s emotion here, in this piece.
You want to hear emotion?
How about fear?
Anxiety?
An overwhelming sense of impending failure?
Of not being good enough?
Of not being at your level?
How about that?
Do you want me to show that?
Do you want me to stumble on the cracks
and fall flat on my face?
Do you want me to fall deeper into this hole
of insecurity, this lack of closure about being comfortable
in front of you,
when I know you’re just going to shred my poetry
because it’s first copy?
Is that what you want from me?!

..The answers fall at me in
blank stares.
Patient stares.
Patiently waiting
for me to read T.S. Eliot
and how hollow and dead the men are.
Why do I even like this piece?
I have to find an excuse, I suppose.
It has feeling, but at the same time it has no feeling.
And the imagery, that’s good too.
But lack of feeling.
That sounds fun.
I wish I couldn’t feel fear.
Then I’d read everything
and I wouldn’t care about you
ripping my art into billions of pieces.
But I care too much about it
to let you critique it.
It’s mine, and I like it how it is.
The fear eats me alive, and
I flee, afraid to feel failure.
So, for now, you’ll have to sit
through a semi-monotone
“The Hollow Men.”

… This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whisper.
Whew, glad that’s over.
I doubt it was as good as Marlon Brando,
but at least I read it.
And now they’re talking about Apocalypse Now
so I guess I didn’t need to know why I liked it.
But at least I had an answer.
One more answer than what I got before.
Some of them are leaving for sketch comedy,
four glued to the chairs,
waiting to share and for things to be shared.
I don’t know what I should share.
I don’t know if I should share.
The group is smaller.
Maybe it will be easier.
But nothing is jumping out at me.
“Hey, you said you had a lot of your poems posted.”
Thanks for putting me on the spot,
now I feel obligated to share something.
But nothing is good.
Nothing seems good enough to throw out at them,
no lightning in a bottle,
nothing that will punch them in the face and they’ll still enjoy it,
nothing that will blindside them with unexpected greatness.
And I’ll fall silent,
Listening to the guy to my right
reading his poems at four thousand miles per hour.
Sorry, buddy, but I can’t understand it.
Maybe it’s me, but it seems
you’re reading too fast.
I suppose everyone has their own speed,
but yours is not mine,
and mine is not yours,
and I just can’t hear correctly
what you’re saying.

Maybe I’ll share something,
maybe this one,
maybe that one,
maybe some other one.
But I’ll find one,
because now I’m obligated, put on the spot,
overhead light searing my skin,
hands trembling wild,
voice cracking randomly
stuttering, stumbling over words,
voice volume varying.
But I’ve locked that fear in this poem
so I’ll be O.K.,
in the end,
I hope.
But here it is.
Hope you like it.

#242                                                         09-11-07

When I Fell In Love

I tried to fight it.
I didn’t want you
to invade my heart
because I knew you didn’t love me.
But when I got in your car
and felt you near me again,
felt the aura that emanates around you,
my insecurity washed away,
and I felt better to be myself.
And when you drove away from my house,
the concept of keeping you out
of my broken heart faded to dust.
We didn’t talk much though.
I wanted to say a lot of things,
but I choked on the words
as I drowned in the scent of your sweet perfume.
You just drove,
unaware of what you were doing to me.
By the time we got to the party,
your name lined the outer shells of my heart,
seeping lower into the depths as time passed.
Your beauty compromised my cognitive thought,
to the point at which it was all I could do to look away.
I just wanted to be near you,
feel your warmth surround me again,
and that was all I wanted to feel.
There was something in your eyes that stole my breath away,
something in your smile that made my problems disappear.
I was falling deeper into the spiral,
the fires seeped throughout my body
and I felt paralyzed by you,
though you hadn’t done anything.
Every second that passed
meant another thought,
another passionate feeling
had found its place in my heart,
until you were all I felt,
all I thought about.
When you drove me home,
I stared out the window,
keeping my eyes away from you
because I was scarcely able to look away from you.
When you pulled into the driveway to drop me off,
I wanted to invite you in,
I wanted to kiss you goodbye,
I wanted to tell you everything.
But I kept to myself,
and I watched you as you drove off,
leaving me and my feelings behind.

#241                                             09-08-07