I’m Still Fond Of You

You still bore me to beautiful, brazen tears,
brown eyes brimming with books that I’ll write,
all about the secrets we slept next to,
eyelids and final words, heavy, still weighing on hearts and minds, years later.

You are boring,
but it isn’t your fault.
I can see you,
trying to control the cosmos as you speak,
panicked, purple veins on your forehead,
stamping all over the youth that used to sleep there.

There are monsters that made a home in your mind,
and I am like catnip to the captive monsters you’ve managed to quieten down.
I can see them jumping and jeering behind your blue eyes as you pause, bite your tongue, anchor your stare on my full, firm lips and drink down as much oxygen as you can accept,
drowning them in defiant silence.

You won’t like anything that I’ve said,
and I’m obnoxiously okay with that.
Sweetness, I was only joking when I said you were my soulmate,
and now I know how your favourite gay (other than me, of course) felt,
when he realised that there were people with real feelings,
who really loved him,
and that people are more than poseable, portable toys.

There are people that really love me,
and I just prop them up in a corner, somewhere shadowed, in the back of my mind,
hoping that they’ll wither and wander towards heaven, like every houseplant I have tried to be a mother to,
but they are fed by something other than water and the sweetness of sunlight,
so they, to my surprise and inconvenience, live,
continuing to love me.

I have monsters too.
I am a slave to them,
that’s how I can see how yours send you sobbing when nobody is looking.
Mine are quite different,
but, much like you, my body is not my own, unless I really struggle,
so I struggle,
as you do,
and I block out every nice, nonsense sentence,
every hopeful, heartbroken glance over a shoulder that has yet to learn not to look back,
and I sing from the trees, like the most ruthless of ravens,
about how boring it all is.

I play that boring, beautiful song to all of my girls,
ever since I met you.

I’m still fond of you.