poem

 Having

When I look upon certain faces

(Let’s be honest, the ones I see most)

All I see are the imperfections.

I’m the weird one watching 

Your resting face

Lost in thought face

Tired unguarded face 

All the times you’re a face

Who forgets she’s a face.

Wrinkles, spots, blemishes 

I could freehand a topographical map

And then lead you on tours 

Along harrowing crevasses

Loosening into mudslides of skin.

 

Everyone else notices 

When you smile or laugh

How you light up a room

Like a flash of summer lightning

When the power goes out.

But I've been scanning the sky for hours,

Before the firmament ever foamed blue

With towering plumes of cumulonimbus.  

Everyone else is normal

No one else is me.

The kind of beauty 

I’m looking for only comes in such a flash

So you have to pay attention

Without trying too hard.

Concentrated gazes tend to efface

All traces of the sublime.

Maybe I only know one rote way of doing it.

Even Aphrodite is approachable if you stare long enough.

Try this:

Conjure your most beautiful verses.

Then write them down in chalk.

Soon, a janitor arrives and erases

It all before a single word can be memorized.

That gutting moment when I realized

The truest meaning of having arises

Only in the context of inexplicable loss.

There’s no perfect way to describe it:

A wide eyed terror,

The blackboard blank and no one left to kiss,

Just me, sneezing in a cloud of white dust.

Seeing is what happens inside our heads

On ghostly blank canvases

Spattered with paints that we

Approach with makeshift brushes,

Hesitant to smear with unwieldy strokes.

Don't ask me what I see.

You’ll know the ugliness

That lives inside of me.

12/18/21