Penultimatum

Tell me that you love me
like we're both still kids
harboring a feeling
yet to be named
to be invoked
like long lost scripture
passed straight from god
to our lips
through our lips
a revelation
a sadness to be so happy
as we admit to love
to the loneliness
that comes with caring
beyond reason or proximity
for a person that isn't ourselves

Pumpkins

I'm wondering when
these words will turn into pumpkins
falsehoods delivered on glass slippers
set to disappear come midnight
come some arbitrary truth
made of me
and delivered by me
unto me
as if the failure to produce them
would render me less than I am
a flirtation with disaster
with a self
determined by a series of definitions
meanings scrounged from syllables
scrounged from fairy tales
that never ended happily ever after
until we rewrote them that way

Tell me a Fable

It never ends
this life of ours mere fodder
for the storyteller
selfsame as our selves
a parasitic collective
with a talent for dialects
and a love for words
that does justice
in the name of precocious youth
that state of the species
wanting a self
which words do nothing for

Four

You were so cute
in four hundred words
in smiles aimed squarely
off-center
as if there was something
someone
pressing gently on the frame

Four hundred
became four thousand
with hands held
in the space
we failed to fill
in the absence
of the truth

I wanted to stop counting
to stop believing
there was a finite number
we could exchange
but when four became forty
our shared language
had run out

Turkey and Gibberish

We're all quite comfortable
with nonsense that sounds good
the please and thank you clatter
of a turkey dinner table
that revolving mess
of grudges given up
animosities suspended
but only briefly
only as long as there is more
to pass clockwise and counter
to consume without reason
until the very marrow
is swallowed down