I Wrote You a Poem

I wrote you a poem.

This isn’t it.

I wrote it in class

Sitting next to you.

Every time your eyes would catch mine

As you glanced for the time

I would write another line

And deep inside

Our connection would grow.

Of course you didn’t know.

I would be listening to the lecture and our eyes would meet

Like strangers on the street

You would ask me for directions

And I would point to me

You would laugh and say

“That’s what not a mean. You’re not a direction.”

I would smile and say

“Yes I am, I’m forward.”

The problem was that the poem wasn’t working.

Alliterations mellowed the mix with melodrama

Iambic pentameter

Could draw your heart but not your breath

Allusions were forgotten faster than films about ghosts

Similes crumbled like a brace supporting too much weight

Because you are neither like nor as anything I have ever seen before.

So I painted you a picture.

Because they say it’s worth a thousand words

And I thought that could save me some time.

I started with your smile.

I closed my eyes and looked into yours

And remembered the last time I made you laugh.

That smile.

That smile that makes your cheeks rise up like little balloons

That smile that covers your perfect white teeth.

That your body folds out from underneath

That hides the sadness behind your eyes

That catches the tears when you cry

That spits the words “I want to die.”

And I could not just paint it white.

That smile could not be painted on canvas

It could not be constrained by just two dimensions and one color

No brush could paint the sweetness that it provides

And the bitterness that lies behind.

Because your smile transcends any x or y axis

It not only has height and length but it has an effect

And I didn’t know how to paint all that.

So I wrote you a song.

It was on piano.

And it was about what I wanted to say to you.

How I muted myself like palm on guitar

How my thoughts echoed like singing from afar.

How my verses were pros programming me to refrain from that refrain which confessed the mess that could cause a regress in the progress that I made.

How we were like two notes unaware that together we could be so much more beautiful.

But I couldn’t keep it slow.

So I wrote you a movie, because I love movies.

It was not a romance, but an adventure.

I wrote and wrote

And by the end I couldn’t bare to look at what I had written.

For the lines of the script were like lines of script like lines of cursive curving lies drawing lines never lifting my pen I had written lies.

Life is not like a movie.

The monologues that I rehearse never leave my head,

When I stand alone no one comes up behind me and asks what’s wrong

When I say something clever the scene does not end,

There is no perfect conclusion that paints an illusion that all problems have a solution that can be found in just ninety minutes.

I had to keep writing because each problem solved presented another new,

I had pages and pages

I could not stop and

Eventually I had something different entirely.

So now I hold for you a bible,

And on it I swear

That one day

We’ll write something together.