My heart the poet

It took me too long to realize,

too late in my life to learn

why my heart is so fickle,

why my heart is so rash,

so melancholy

or boisterous,

so timid yet unapologetically loud.

My heart is a poet,

it reads into emotions so deeply it gets lost,

a symptom left behind after years of pretending we didn’t have any.

That my heart was void of feeling,

untouchable, unsinkable, stoic.

But it was never true.

Deep down the pressure was building,

melting the ice caps from your lips,

burning and boiling

til it erupts.

Torrents of apologies,

clouds of unrequited love,

rivers of molten love poems.

See my heart is a poet,

it writes sonnets into smoke clouds,

metaphors into magma,

alliteration always arching across the abandoned allegories,

smiling like a simile.

My heart is a poet.

It does not know when to be still.

It cannot speak below a whisper.

It looks out into the world and sees so much love and possibility.

I am envious of my heart.

He gets broken,

he gets torn,

he gets beaten and bruised,

but continues to love again,

continues to stand up and walk.

My heart is a gladiator,

a fighter, a warrior.

Surrender is not in its vocabulary,

but sometimes it needs help.

Sometimes it needs my help

to accept that some hearts will never learn to dance with us,

that some hearts no longer look outside,

no longer have the strength to get back up again.

My heart can never understand why those it beats for, never come back.

But it’s ok,

he doesn’t have to