I Have Sold Love so Fully to the Wind

The streetlights were devout in their daylight habits

as they watched the stars forgetting us.

Beneath that cosmic wreck, 

I saw you in a blue slipstream of a sundress, laughing

in your flailing way that resembled polite drowning.

There was potential in the air. Visions of fresh holes in my hands,

melted e-cigarettes and the two o’clock way your love would surround 

clanged through my head in syllables. 

But rather than harness such raw sound to words

I took turns glancing at pine trees, black pebbles, streetlights and your striking eyes.

This is the way I say nothing most fluently.

It is for weakness under the weight of my words 

(I chant to myself snuggled in bed.)

You left and left 

a small wake to pass the spinning seconds

before the next strange restructure of my world.

Since in many ways I am a serial stumbler, 

transfixed by the window-shopping

  for each new mind holds such revolution!

This or that face will be a fire about which my poems will gather as moths,

and each girl with straight teeth will surely deal in bargain-priced 

eudaemonia and slow oatmeal mornings.

Across the ingrown pavement of this city men and 

women in my same ratty underwear are writing

with me. They write of manufactured loss,

spawned from those most selfish recesses

where the fear retires to whine. And all of them 

have seen her drowning slowly in her laughter 

and thought only of how to write her a love poem.

The streetlights flicker to white in pairs

and the stars sneak down the vault of sky as smiling thieves.

Reviews

[Penelope Voljeti]

This poem is seriously amazing. I haven't read one that spoke to me so strongly as this one does in a long time. I'm definitely saving this one for later!

[Anthony J]

I really appreciate you taking the time to read! You have made my day! haha