Sometimes you begin to tell me a story that you've already told me, but I let you continue.
I just nod, smiling, appearing as though everything you're telling me is brand new. Yet if I'm being honest, I don't truly listen to the words. I listen just enough so that I seem attentive, I keep my responses bland and short.
However, I use those times to study you, encapsulate your voice, absorb all your mannerisms and expressions. I watch the way you create each syllable rather than hear the meaning behind them. I focus on everything about you except the content of your speech.
For those precious moments I will never stop you from retelling me your story.
I'm simply grateful to be able to hear you tell them to me twice.
Tag: Poetry
Grief
The sutures separate as old memories stir, sadness spills out from between the seams. But that's grief… Dehiscing delicate wounds each time they decide to close.
Despondent
While your despondent eyes
were cast downward,
I glanced at you as you held my hand.
Solemnly you watched as your pale finger rhythmically rubbed the soft skin
alongside the base of my thumb.
Your gaunt stare immediately
imprinted itself into my mind,
haunting me as a witness
to pure hopelessness.
We sat there together if only for a moment...
My words stifled.
Your silence deafening.
Ignorance
When you learn a new word,
suddenly it's everywhere.
You see it appearing on signs
around your all too familiar town...
You hear it echoing from a stranger's
mouth in another room...
You suddenly notice it blatantly staring
back at you from the pages in a book
you've read five times before...
But it's not coincidental.
It's simply the ignorance
to what you've always overlooked
beginning to fade away.
Detached
She couldn't understand why
she never felt the pain...
It had to have hurt.
It was the cortisol,
the norepinephrine...
It was the chemicals produced from
sheer panic that had instantaneously
turned her blood into red rivers
of viscous lidocaine.
Her senses so forcibly amplified
that everything else had just
gone numb.
Rabbit Hole
You followed me down
the rabbit hole.
My selfish hand found yours
and I led you into the darkness.
Quietly...
Recklessly...
Blindly.
I should have known that
I wouldn't be able to guide myself...
Let alone the both of us.
0918
She regretted her silence.
She regretted not putting up a fight.
She regretted blankly staring
into the off-white frame holding
one of the happiest moments of her life...
While he was giving her one of her worst.
One Hour
In sixty minutes the sharp cascade
of volatile thoughts will cease
and I'll no longer be gagging
on the anger trapped
in the back of my throat.
My illogical rage cannot be challenged
with basic breathing techniques
and mundane meditative counting.
My only remedy is time.
So give me one hour...
Sixty minutes...
3600 fucking seconds...
And then I'll be okay.
201
I think about you every day.
I remind myself to remember
the complexity of your eyes,
the softness of your hands,
and the comfort of your voice
as I refuse to forget the details
that I held so close.
I will keep you with me
for as long as I can,
Even if only in my mind.
Nostalgia
I am nostalgic for that day,
even though it never existed.
In reality we were never there.
We never walked down that street under fluorescent lights. We never sat surrounded by bushes on that wrought iron bench.
Your hands never felt mine, our bodies never touched, and our eyes never did meet.
That day...
Those moments...
All those memories are fictitious.
Yet somehow, someway,
I still remain able to miss it.
AO Poetry 
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