Face to Face

You said to me you preferred face to face contact.
You kept my number in your phone for two weeks.
It waited there with all the other numbers awkward
and uncomfortable with a feeling like having to pee
in a place with no bathroom.
Then, our faces did meet, and even though my number had
given up all hope and become the depressed outcast of your
phone, you said let’s have dinner and you used my number
the next day to set it up, and my number experienced a
renewed sense of meaning in life.

So, our faces sat across from each other over a meal at a
Moroccan restaurant and had a very pleasant conversation
and they walked back to my apartment and there
continued to talk, and you said how you liked
human interaction and tangible products and angry music

all of which my face and my phone number approved of heartily
and in fact, our faces liked each other so much that they were
drawn toward one another at the end of the night and for one moment
we couldn’t stop them from touching.

It’s only the next day, but my face is thinking of yours, specifically my
lips feel that there was some unfinished business, and they have
stubbornly formed themselves into a semi-colon waiting for
the second part of their sentence, creating another awkward
feeling and forcing me to send you an email,

even though I know you prefer to speak in person. I am much more
articulate and secure in writing, and my message
is pleading with you to read between the lines or
rather to complete each sentence as you would in the SAT test
The longer my email stays in your inbox, the more
it begins to identify with my phone number,
which still hasn’t completed enough therapy to really be
over the trauma you caused it.

I try to comfort my email, saying there is no reason to be so
dramatic, email, you hardly even know this guy, so don’t
invest too much hope or desire or longing in him, because
it is a waste of emotion and you are probably just hormonal, email
so stop nagging me all day with your wants.

My email talks back, saying this is the first time in a long time
it has any chance of getting something resembling what it might
want, so it’s important not to let that go, and I have to agree
with my email’s logic, because my email is, after all, a part of me
and like me is floating in an in-between sort of world hoping
to grab onto something.

Trompe L'oeuil

You changed your facebook status to
in a relationship with her.
In the 7 years we were together we never did this.
I never felt like declaring it.
How funny to find out now in such a brutal and
electronic manner,
that you didn’t love me as much as I loved you.

No wonder, my dear, no wonder I kept asking
all the time for your reassurance, I would say to you
Do you love me? until you had to tell me to stop
and I changed it to a suggestive, I love you
question mark, dot dot dot.

Sometimes you have an animal instinct telling you
things you do not know in the manifest world.
How real and tangible your love seemed
I wanted to reach out and grab it, but
I could never get a grasp on it. Mine was
so much deeper, dear, so deep I had to let it go
for the weight of it was crushing my chest.

*Another one of my breakup poems from a while back.

Used

His great aunt wanted someone to be there
when she went to the bathroom,
even this became an uncertain journey,
she wanted to be a little girl again,
with mother to nurse her.
But there were no mothers there,
only daughters, and one was willing
to sit, and wait, for her to push something through.

My great grandmother said to me,
Don’t worry, you will get used to the boat
rocking and rocking, your legs will adapt.
That was an ugly thing to say, so ugly
I can’t even write it.
She was the one stepping onto a boat,
learning to lull and creek and disappear
and cross an ocean.

His great aunt’s house was white with blond wood
and dolls and collections of glass shoes
and tiffany’s lamps.
Everything so used to being in a certain place,
and wearing and wearing into that place
that nothing could be moved.

There was that clinging, you could feel
the pillows clinging to the seats,
and the plastic flowers set in so tightly,
and that feeling, that long feeling,
that used and no more using feeling.

*A poem from a few years ago.