A Word If You Can Spare

Her eyes dart. There's me, left, below, and sometimes nothing. She's juggling, but doesn't think to catch her parts. They simply wait to hit the ground. Her face is focus, and wonder underneath. If you peel you find quiet fears with loud reasons. Her answers aren't clear but they are transparent. When enough words swell and battle to describe her, she fades, and in her absence, her emptiness speaks to me:

Newborn memory
You stand before me
And taunt me with
The arms at your side

Your blood makes me move
Your bones keep me still
I need your skin to keep me
Clothed

But when I see through you
I do not see you
When I speak to you
My words do not travel

Where do they go, the things we hold in our hands?
How do we find them, the things we never lost?
When will we remember the things we never learned?
Why I do not love you

So I answer with my fleeing words and sounds, and all the things that emerge from my fingers, eyes, and sores. I answer with my unseen stares, my unwashed heart, and unwanted needs. In whispers to the world, and notes sacrificed before so many altars I say:

You cannot tickle your own foot
Though you might feel its scratch

You cannot frighten your own hand
Though it bows in its submission

You cannot yearn for things for you have
But might miss what you've misplaced

You cannot see yourself
Except before a mirror

I know no metaphor or trickery
I can only tell you what you are
A filled cup desperate to pour
A defiant falling
Juice

I have no solution, but am thoroughly immersed
I mistake double meanings for twice the words
Curiosities for desires
Wisdoms for truths

Love is not a thing you wait for
Come to
Or bring

Passion is not a paper trick
Of many-fold wonders
Hung by a string

And alone is not a number

They are the bubbling parts of your mind
The transformable parts of a world
And the means of my meaning

They are words

I'm writing them now, but may come back to hack off parts. What she has is still a mystery to me, but I know I have both longing and love. Freshly plucked with no jar to keep them. Her eyes no longer dart, but remain, and in her stillness her absence wanes. The earth is quiet again beneath me, but remembrances below me still flood with meaning.

I may be here for a while.