Bare
For the Boy Who Finally Gets a Poem Written About Him
We’re on the phone.
Even as I know not to believe you,
your proclamations are flint
sparking up dormant desire. I want
to trust you. I really do.
You say that you can see us getting married
someday
among other declarations.
For the duration of the call, I allow
myself to buy into it though I know
they’re just words. After all,
when are they not?
Words
are what has kept us connected for all these years.
Why we always find our way back
to each other. Your words
become hands that undress me.
Sometimes quickly: those nights
when I don’t have the strength to fight them.
Other moments slowly: the times
when we’re in no particular rush. Free to lounge in the debates,
the word play, the carefully crafted assurances.
Your words know how to rub up
against the correct spots, causing an outpouring of my own.
They pull at my disbelief, worries, and frustrations
until I am exposed to you. But
never fully.
The gift is mutual.
Each word that fills my mouth is strategic
so that I know how to make you swell. To inflate
you until you’re ready to
burst–words falling out in a rush
as you make promises that are nothing
more than pretty words inserted
into all the right places, the empty spaces.
Because in this festival of flirting,
what we say and what we feel
come second to how it is said.
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