"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, July 29, 2016

Original: Your Pages (2009)

 Old poem this month.  I've been planning for a while to go through some of my old stuff and clean it up a bit.  I don't know that I'm quite satisfied with "Your Pages" yet, but I've always kind of liked it, so I thought I might as well take it out for a spin.  (Note:  I wrote this long before I knew I was aro and ace, but it was never an attempt to be about me - it was always meant to be an unnamed persona.)

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Your Pages

Tear your pages from my book
So I don’t have to read you anymore,
Because every time I catch
A whisper of you in the corner of my eye,
The story writes itself anew.
The same old lovers’ quarrel
With its joy and heartbreak
Rising and falling in time
To the turn of the plot,
Its contradictions in tone,
And its sloppy metaphor.

I just can’t read you anymore.
But every time your eyes
Cross their orbit with mine,
The bad sequel starts taking shape
In the triter parts of my head,
Complete with out-of-character leads
And half-baked plots
Recycled from any old dime-store romance.
Because we’re both so much better than that,
But that’s all we write
When we’re together.
That’s our hackneyed external conflict
Cycling through and through
The same tired literary beats
And thematic mishmash,
And that plot’s long since played out.
Surely there are other stories worth writing,
Other loves worth having,
Other joys worth fighting for.

So I can’t read you anymore.
It’s high time we turn the page
And find someone
Who makes us see the point of happiness
By the glow of their laugh;
Someone who makes us feel
We might be who and where
We want to be, or at least,
Hope we could be someday.
Let’s not even shake hands
But part and follow the line
Of our separate hero’s journeys,
So we can each write new stories
About someone whose songs
Aren’t forever going out of rhyme.

But if I read you one more time…

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