Thursday, April 24, 2014

Poem A Day, 022

Today is a Tuesday, and you know what that means: Two for Tuesday Prompts! Write one, write the other, and/or write both!

Write an optimistic poem. The glass is half full.
Write a pessimistic poem. The glass is half empty.

This is more of a pessimistic poem, about frustration over a five-year relationship that never went where I wanted it to go.

Blank Canvas

Somewhere between coffee cup
and the sink she realizes
He’s at it again:
sifting through messages.
The reason they’re
at his apartment,
drinking his weak coffee,
using his sour towels,
curling into his hard bed.
Messages.

She rinses the cup,
listens to him hum
some foreign lullaby,
one his mother maybe
sang to him?
His mother he
never mentions.
Volumes of words on
economy and currency exchange.
Talks and says nothing,
his voice a blank canvas,
a sham in the MoMA
and everyone is buying.

She dries the mug,
turns it over and over
in her hands.
Aging hands,
she thinks.
He’s typing now,
and she knows,
today their time is done.
The sheets still
bear their warmth,
the creases like
meringues whipped stiff
the night before,
now stale.

The cup clean in her hands,
she returns it to the cabinet.
Without a sound,
She toes into her shoes,
slides into her blouse
and slips out
without a word
like she was
never
even

there.

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