She

A very rough draft of a poem

 

She waits to talk to me, but I

am always too distracted, focused

on what’s at hand; usually reading

and writing everything I can.

 

My consumption of language becomes

so out of control as I read

more and more until my head is full.

She waits. I forget she’s even

 

there needing my words, my support,

because everything has become

about the words I plan to write

but not to say; I fill my head with

poems and paragraphs

 

while her heart drains slowly.

Because of me. Because I forgot.

Sometimes I’ll read and put myself

in the words of someone else,

living through their writing,

but other times I re-live

everything I write. It makes

 

life challenging to her. Because

she needs me to be with her, but

all I can do is write

and I write for her but she

needs to hear my voice as she tells

me what’s wrong. My words

need to be about what she says, not

about what I feel. When we walk together,

our conversations become disjointed as I say

the things I planned to speak to her

 

but they’re not what she needs to hear.

It takes me so long to come up with a response

to whatever she has told me

that by the time my words are ready, my voice prepared,

her crisis is solved. She needs me,

but I’m just never there.

 

My writing, free, verse, meter, is never

enough or right to help her.

She is longing for a quick connection

but my anxiety of saying anything wrong

makes me feel like everything

I say is wrong unless I spend

hours preparing each word,

chopping and seasoning,

 

boiling and frying, pressing

together and tearing apart,

forming my thoughts so specially,

so scientifically yet artfully. She

loves me enough that she will work

with my anxiety, but still

I feel like every word I say fills

the air around me and crowds

my body until I’m under stress,

ready to collapse.

 

She can calm me down,

but only until I speak again.

Only until words need to be

spoken once more and I know she

is hurt that I can never have the words for her,

that always all I can do is

be there to listen, and not to

give the advice I used to,

I know that she misses it, she misses

me and thinks I’ve changed but

I’m just sick and I can be better

but I cannot be better right now

because every word I speak provokes

anxieties. Every word like a cannon,

drowning out the world around me

in a mess of crashing noise.

 

She still loves me. I

don’t deserve to be loved by her,

because the person she fell in love

with was not sick. The person

she loves was someone else, witty

and compassionate, but my

mind has strangled that person

and replaced her lover with

me. I have trouble finding

the difference, but I see it

through her eyes. She

still loves me, but does she love me for who I can

be? Does she love me for who I was?

Or does she love me for me,

brokenness, anxiety, disease,

and lack of the advice I used

to give?

 

She has waited for so long

for who I used to be. She has waited

so long for just me. She can never

ever have what she needs

from me.