That draft I've been working on...
The Honest Hours
When I look through our old letters,
The pictures of ironic smiles we secretly meant,
And remember the words we blushed to finally say,
I see the beautiful friendship
We should have fought for
When our house-of-cards brick wall,
Our embryonic family,
Fell.
When we failed each other.
The last thing that died
Was our ability to hold each other at night.
Whatever we did to hurt each other
We could still kiss eyebrows
And whisper promises.
You were cruel to me that day;
And I neglected your tears;
(Tears were the weather those days;
They were inevitable
And the solution is always covering up.)
But your hair still smelled like the world to me;;
And my heartbeat still brought you home.
It’s because our conceits always died
About two hours after sunset;
When the world became dark,
There was nothing left to prove,
And we two scientists in love
Believed in magic
For fleeting moments the length of a dance.
It’s why atheists still love Christmas:
Dark days are like tangible music
And we already have it within us to love this world
For days at a time.
The love of magic is within us:
Snow from a purple sky;
Old-sweater arms and soft-blanket secrets;
A confession spoken with surreptitious hands.
An hypothesis; an experiment;
An inconclusive result.
Eyes suddenly wet with the moon;
A voice suddenly activated by stars
And then spirited away by the dawn.
You called this The Honest Hours.
In daylight our needs drowned
In society the consistency of Winter-molasses.
But for the hours between stars and sleep
We loved each other enough not to lie.
I would miss nights of sleep
To hear that tone of voice
That only existed then and only for me;
To finally get to know you a little more,
And to make murder-plot jokes again
In the morning.
There’s a kiss you give only at midnight.
I starved and dissolved
Waiting, always waiting, for midnight.
I remember how this scared you.
I remember your thousand-yard gaze
Of mud-stained purple-hearted flower pedals.
I remember the windowless blackout of our first nest
Where your heart finally took up space in monolith whispers.
I remember untraceable promises made in code:
An atheist’s leap of faith onto hidden trampolines
Just shy of lethal distance.
We thought love was only true if it existed reluctantly.
So then, my once Bluebell, there came time
When you lived for day and not for night.
With your game-face now stapled to your
Allegedly dry cheeks,
We forgot to love each other deliberately.
We protected our remaining vanity with myths.
Our oaths were always written in pencil.
You sacrificed my heart on the alter of your self-esteem;
And your fight-or-flight needs wrote gospel
In false virtue and mirror-perfected nonchalance.
I don’t blame you.
We’re taught to be this way.
I hope you still see magic in the sky.
I hope you smile whether it’s blue or black.
I hope you’ve learned to fall into arms
The same way you fell into bluebells;
Knowing you’ll be caught.
I hope we can move on
Without profaning each other.
I hope for peace.
