Xenophobia

(inspired by Carrie Rudzinski's "Elbows".)
(rough draft - to be finished soon!)

On a cold night in February,
Your conscience whispers that
It's about time
you tell her about me.
You sit her down,
and you admire her fine
Elevator eyes as
You tell her
that I was the multi-tone secret
you played like octaves
far out of your
tree-swinging monkey arms' reach.
You tell her
about my seat-belt eyes
and flat tire soul,
about how you don't know
what's holding me together
but you don't envy whoever he is.
You tell her about
How I would always birdsong
you to sleep,
lure you into a false sense
of apple bite faith,
hide my half truths in clenched toes,
Tell her how I was always
mood ringing you,
telling you how to experience
our constant changes in climate -

Wait.

That's too much detail.
Keep it short,
scorch the edges, don't
let the smoke scorch us out of hiding.
Gingerbread house your feelings for me,
show her how delicate
our memories really are.
Let her press her candlelight tongue to my rough edges,
frosting in details that were never there,

show her how easy it was
to forget me.

Play me like that,
caress me like cello strings
and whittle a concerto out of my synapses,
reconstruct my half-notes into something beautiful
enough to wave on the holy days, too.
Tell her how you named me broken elevator,
blew my glass heart
from scratch,
how you built my oak tree
from the acorn up
and down like an ocean liner
in our perfect storm -
she doesn't need to know
how you blew me away
with your ferocity of calm,
your Sunday best dinner
tooth-picking my bones clean
as you said grace over and over
to fill that half-empty moon
you hoped would one day fill
With all of the feelings
you never admitted to -

Look me in the snake eyes
and tell me you don't find me
fuckable!

Tell me you can't see yourself living

Inside the confines of my skin box,
you feel trapped behind my canine prison bars,
Like you never asked me
to teach you how to breathe fireflies,
to hold you like a Chinese lantern
at a Japanese folk festival,
to write xenophobia
in bloody scratches down your back
and hate yourself for loving how it hurts.

Don't act like you never

wore my roar like a banner
into the ground
so people wouldn't notice me,
you hated it when people noticed me.
If you're not going to tell her that, then
make sure you
Tell her how we ran out of batteries.
Tell her my summer lovin'
watermelon grins
were never enough to hold your interest.
Tell her I was always asking to rest
my heavy misaligned head
on your holier-than-thou
porch swing hands.
Tell her how we never fit together
but then again, you never tried -

Tell her you don't know who fired

the first love poem,
you just know
it wasn't you.