text
Dinner Napkins

You won’t write me
the way I do you -
you won’t bleed me
onto a page,
you won’t preserve me
in the spaces
of unabridged white,
and you’ll never keep me
the way a poem does.

Thoughts like this
remind me that life
never works out
the way I’d like it to.
I could probably ask
for rotten apples
filled with worms,
and receive the grandest,
golden-red fuji.

Humans always ask
for things that are missing.
Souls are universes 
that have billions of stars
but still crave the sun.
There are pleas for
the want, the desire,
the fruition of hope,
the prayer, the demand,
but never the thank you,
never the adequate,
never the reality
of what we deserve
or have earned
or truly need.

I am guilty of this
in more ways than I
could ever hope (or want) to write.

I don’t need you
but I sure wish
you’d write me on a napkin.

I’d keep it in the coat pocket
right against my chest -
my heart would sing to it
the way a bluejay does the dawn.

#poetry
#spilled ink
#queued from weeks ago
  • »
  • 203 notes