Not a Love Poem.

This is not a love poem. This is about open legs and dead eyes, closed fingers and drunk lies. This is about what the moon does during the day.

This is about coffee gone cold and a voice mail box full of unheard messages and the dial tone. This is about forgetting. This is about artificial lighting and the sun going to sleep early in December. This is about threadbare sweaters. This is not a love poem.

Do not let the world suck you dry and spit out your bones like used toothpicks. But if she does, do not lie on the concrete for too long. Soon your shadow will be traced into the gray, but no one wants to be remembered as the street beggar on the freeway off ramp. His cardboard will not tell his story. This is not a love poem, this is not a love poem.

We both grew up with a mother who wore fake breasts and liposuction. Do not skip meals as a means of weight reduction. I learned too late that size six is not a malfunction and according to math, zero is not natural. We were taught love by the mother of media, we were taught acceptance by "do or die." Measuring cups her practice, scales her god, and magazines her bible. Broken nails on the dashboard read sin and white bread crumbs on her lap were for the birds and coffee was her weekday lover, but the religious require human sacrifice and you. are. it.

Every morning Death's grip proves tighter and your skin. swings. looser, so stop reaching for that bottle to nurse you like your mother's tits did. The bottle is cold and wanting, you are cold and wanting. Your heart is a raw steak on the grill, and you pay for love with bitten fingernails and inadequate sleep. But love is not out for blood, love does not empty your pockets.

Your cheeks are looking hollow ever since you let doubt in and she scooped you out. Ageism is just another way of saying the young deserve to have it all, and you deserve it all, honey, but I don't want "beautiful" to forget you because of a number. I don't want the mirror to pick as your fingers pull. She never learned how to love. Her role in fairy tales was sole beauty pageant judge and she is constantly looking for the fairest one of them all.

I resent that tired old sign on your leg. "No smoking area. Please extinguish cigarettes here." They never learned how to love. They were kissed too briefly and too carelessly, dropped too briefly and too carelessly. They cannot whisper anything but cheap love to your lungs. Do you hear me? Inhale, exhale. I am here. Inhale, exhale. They never read the dictionary and their vocabulary is limited, but they know hate is heard too often and love forgets her own name sometimes.

This is not a love poem. I can't teach you how to kiss the bite, how to atone to the legs that swallowed all your punches. I can't teach you to breathe "I am" into the soles of your feet and walk on water with Peter's faith. I am not a prophet, not a Savior. I won't quote the Bible or the Book of Mormon, but I won't lick the dust off your feet.

This is not a love poem. Inhale, exhale. This is not a love poem.