Starfish

“I think I might be depressed”

is not the best way to kick off a drunk text.

But in my defense, my cell phone was melting in sync with the walls,

and honesty was leaking out my fingertips.  

I had to tell you about it.

Sorry about that, by the way. It was way too late to handle electronics.

And I know it was reckless to hint at the fact that your face 

had been branded on the inside of my eyelids since September,

but I was far gone when I said it,

and it was still true when I came back, 

so sue me.�"

It was 11 the next morning

when your message came,

no emoticons to trumpet its entry.

I read it through headache scream and coffee steam,

and it was just predictable enough to hurt deep.

My tongue got tranquilized, so,

I pressed coffee dregs into my tonsils,

and drained the flavor from my words.

I still spoke, but sentences tasted like boiled potatoes

and sterilized my mouth with bland.

So I ran to my room to re-invent condiments.

First, I tried drizzling depression on overcooked poems.

But they reeked of teen angst and egg salad, and rotted my computer hard drive. 

I scrapped them all.

Then I walked in meadows, introspective, to plant wild mustard,

and wrote about

how your lips were a hammock I could hibernate in,

how your eyes stole the edges of stars when god wasn’t looking,

how your voice made me feel like the angel and the devil on my shoulders 

were playing catch with balls of laughing gas through my ear holes, 

how your hair floated on lightning fingers, and your laugh upstaged the moon.

But I scrapped those poems too. 

I didn’t know why.

until one day I remembered

that you are a human being, 

Not a metaphor.

Not a poem.

Not a series of words strung clumsy like christmas lights.

So I stopped writing,

and my words ripened. 

Sometimes I think my heart just needs hearing aids. 

For example: when I felt your heartbeat through my shirt,

I thought it was a fist knocking on your ribcage from the inside,

Knocking for me. Reaching with skinny fingers.

So I built arms on my heart out of veins and delusion.

I formed the hands too-quick, with soggy paper mâché.

I built them to hold the hands on your heart, but your pulse was 

just a pulse. Not an invitation. 

My heart just heard it wrong is all.

I have recently forgiven it.

When I amputated those ragged limbs,

the stumps bled longer than I thought they would;

But my heart is still the same stupid starfish

and its arms will grow back, eventually.

Thanks again, 

for being my temporary tide-pool.

The water was incredible.