Love and A Pained Laugh
He looked like a cat that got in a fight last night and had to sleep outside.
He was so heavily drunk and in love that sounds were milky and drowned out. I rather hear a guffaw from him than from her something silky and drawn out. The antagony. Be in the present moment anyway. That’s what they tell girls to do.
This is how the lesson of shame dawns upon you. Noticing I loved the wrong person. In our hearts, or our brains, people fade but first cascade their shiny pleasures in the imagination. I did not realize how inconvenient a lack of communication turns out to be, how damaging the stubborn insurrection of misunderstanding, how a cat and mouse game ends up defeated on both ends, how honesty just devastates. There is never known any honesty in some relationships. Just the fear of getting hurt. And the running lies we tell on it.
I thought I heard that the other one he loved was easy to love just by the plain fact that I had loved him, but maybe no one else felt I should be loved back the same way. While making love, it turned out that my self-conscious pain body winced liquid electric shocks and made me hot and unworthy, narrating underneath him, with the conviction of only a saboteur’s mind, what he would say or think about everything.
And worse, I kept it to myself.
That those thoughts exist in him, just as they existed in me. Now she bears a smile to everything that warrants a smile.
All of us have our boundaries crossed, many times we are unaware it is happening. How unfamiliar to us a basic right to speak is.
What I see they feel for each other is as wordless as laughter moves my soul. A soul cracked open, a mouth with incredulous eyes…..
Muscle Poems 
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