You are on a beach and you are swimming

Alone to frolic with the fishes

Adamantly irritating child

You have dropped your warm demeanour

Friday over truffle pizza

Doffed off your autonomy without a sound

A contender for the simper

Of one slavish solipsistic system

There is a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the floor

When your mother said to do the dishes

And there I stood, appropriated in my lilac dress

The housewife I was always meant to be—

Lounging in the living room

Abandoned in a leather couch

The prelude stops and then attenuates

Throughout the drive back from the airport

Palm trees weeping, discourse is a well away

A little golden bell just like an earring falling

You left me to drive away

And so we navigated highways

Made our way towards a faithful

Birthday present you had promised me

Sentimental kisses swaddled in a scene

Promenade throughout the imitation riviera

And then you led me to believe—

You promised you would visit me.

Oceanic stereo is seething

Sunny Isles wrapped about beach

Mellowed casual careening

Not unlike that vulgar evening—

We are in New York

Washington Square

Madison and Union Square

There are all the roses

Smoking drunken soggy joints

Yellow smog like in the poem

When you always used to listen—

Before you learned to have me bleeding

Caught up in your binding string

With men it’s always talk of freedom

Four more years and college days

But just to be a woman—sniffing all the tulips

When I stand up it’s always twisted

Crazy fucking clingy girl

She once dared to have a bloated heart

Diced in red tomatoed pieces

Like those artificial sweeteners

You had had a chance to meet them

Love is crippled in a seizure

Melted phantom swollen pieces

I’ve never had this poignant experience

The man I felt up in the middle of the park

Fondled through my blue-green dress

Coddled on a public bench

On an overt motorbike the bearded man is singing

“You are in love—but get a room!”

We kissed through whiplash in your old apartment

Flashback to my airport wishes

Grand forgotten memories

You would never wish away

Swimming in the lucid water

Pillowed breasts—your kneecap—chest

You have not yet turned eighteen

Revisiting lost dignity

Breathing wheezing nicotine

I am over twenty-three

You are acting quite obscene

Break my heart in the casino.

Well you can dream of being filthy rich—

Or a meagre suicidal failure

Sometimes I would wager—

All the jokes you used to say

Jumping from the balcony

If this selfsame reality did not bend your way—

Sometimes I would wager you were speaking truths

When you stood beneath the fountain deep in the casino

Burning up your kindness as you gambled it away

But gradually…

For I never did perceive the difference

Between a genuine apology

And these manufactured platitudes

Soaking bathtub whiskey suds

Showerhead against my chest

Microphoning muffled notes

When we wished away commitment

Buying clothes without your mother

Generously gruesome and grotesque.

You have never mentioned how I begged you for the sex

Perhaps that makes me a seductress,

Uncouth Russian empress

Wishing you to have the best.

“Listen here I fucking love you,

Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.”

Evanescent New York fragments

Brought you back to your Miami

Oh, but I was just in a good mood that day

Really, when I asked you later, lying in your bed

But did you really mean it?

But did you really mean it.

But did you really mean it!

We are sitting over mushroom pizza

And your leather wallet paints a silent scene

Oh, I am aware, that there are always other people

But did you need to break my heart at the casino

Liqueured ice cream and a piece of olive oil bread

So does your temper fluctuate entirely

With all the earnings that you stash beneath your belt

Well I once thought that I could teach you—

As one wise man used to say—

Not to be a whore for money

But what other whores exist by definition

The other whore is just another me

But do you remember how you cared for me

New York winters

Soft Miami streets

“This is how it’s meant to be.”

Do you remember when I fought to see you

How the planes were nearly silenced

All our transit wiped away

Largely differential

Nullified, quiescent

Love affair

Miami Beach

Another weekend

“But I didn’t want to do it.”

But do you remember how we stood in the casino

Bat your stupid beautiful eyelashes towards me

Digesting morning news

Like that song you used to listen to

Nirvana, Polly, and the Beatles

Taking in a breakfast fluke

Horror or disquietude

Welcome to the real machine

Your docile marble crippled housewife

I remember cleaning up the laundry

Washing all the dishes

Just so I could stand here screaming

As you leave another evening

Fucking all your sophomoric friends

Thinking one day I shall leave you

Just as you had left behind my reading

And so we went around the marble arches

Just as when I took the trip to show you

What could have been this you and me

Reflection of a hazy dream

Don’t you dare request another thing from me

By Liza Libes

From: United States

Website: https://pensandpoison.com/

Facebook URL: https://www.facebook.com/otherpoeticponderings