clavicola:

You didn’t know me when I was 
young enough to believe that 
you could bloom love like
orchids on the kitchen table. 

My father loved my mother
the way Degas loved his ballerinas.
He wanted to carve her out of marble,
but forgot that statues
don’t have heartbeats. 

— only cold palms, and 
        silk folds of stone. 

How do you learn to love when you were 
never taught to as a child? 

Trial and error is a difficult price to pay when you
want to know the recipe to make the perfect love. 

Two hearts, two artichokes. 
Too many reasons not to say Goodnight just yet. 

Tonight as I walked underneath romanticized moonlight
and picadilly streetlights,  I saw a man and a woman dancing. 

It was two in the morning and the streets were quiet 
and the old man sitting corner-side was yelling about the end of
the world, but still they swayed into each other’s skin wordlessly,
draping two shadows across the road that melted into one. 

In her red dress she smiled into his chest and he held her
like her shoulders were the only thing keeping him alive, and 

I, alone, looked in my purse for a way to remember, but found instead

two hearts, two artichokes
and too many reasons not to say Goodnight
just yet.