This Is Only a Test

[carose59]

This Is Only a Test



                   I have walked this season before,
                           loved this green,
my face has been stroked by these breezes.

                     There is nothing new in spring;
                         each snowflake is unique,
                        but every daisy is the same. 

This is the spring I was six, and
                    thirteen, and
                    thirty-four,
        the spring I finished school,
        the spring I fell in love with you;
        the            only
            spring.

A plane soars overhead and I watch,
                                longing to be on it,
                 flying home.

 Nothing is right;     wearing skin that doesn't fit
               hair the color of someone else's hair
             my own words are jangled and pointless;
                       ugly, clumsy; saying nothing.

Would silence be sweeter?


    I was looking for someone to pour
                            the beauty back into me,
                      someone to take me
    away from the ugly thoughts of self to somewhere


                                          somewhere.


Maybe it would have been better
                    had I never seen
 those places you touched
                                         and loved

                          Never learned to love
 the spots your shadow grazed,
                          never found
 your mother’s love.

        If I could see my way through your mythology
  perhaps I could find the line
       between pathology and poetry
       between   empathy and drowning in your pain--
                but maybe it's too late for reality;
                       even the mundane is myth now.

And spring buds
           blossoms
           blooms,
                  leaving me abandoned without you--
                     even the touchstones of my life
                         have forsaken me.

    I'm forty-one now, an odd, uncomfortable number,

Yet spring still holds me on the brink: the end of school,
                       the false promise of freedom
                                       and lethargy.

Do you think it's coincidence that all my stories now
 are tales of resurrection?

                               Delusional.

      Yes.  When is love not a delusion?

    Were you waiting for me,
          former dreamy adolescent with penchant for
                                       death poetry,
     now a woman with a life she can't quite juggle?
                     Your love
                    (this love I cultivate,
                                   nurture,
                               reap for you)
                                  stretches me,
                            demands more of me than
I ever dreamt I had.
   You ransack my heart, searching,
                           finding the places
                   I have           locked up,
 sworn never to enter.

  What's in that room?

  Break down the door!
                             Throw open the windows!
    Let in the starlight!
                             Show it to me,
                             give it to me,
                                   feed me with it--

Yes.

                     Make up the bed and sleep there

in not-quite-solitude


  let the silence caress,
  let the shadows whisper
                            words of impossible love

  let the ecstasy well up inside me
  let the music pour out--
          my tears will wash away despair,
          my sighs drown out the soft parting words.