When you laughed and said that all of Kodaline’s songs are hopeless and people cannot
Save us
I didn’t think about how
I have choked on every opportunity at love
And drowned countless plants in the names of those who have left,
How the plants died soon after, and how you will leave too; but, this poem is not a metaphor
For why I refuse to let you go
Or how a woman in Moscow
Described you as an almost-lover of John Lennon,
Rather an ode to why
I traded my Oasis records
For the red in your cover of Plath’s Ariel;
How you met me in a post-Woolf fiction setting
In an August of burning battle cries on your melodica,
Why your laughter still inhabits places it shouldn’t, like beneath my tongue, everywhere, and
Everywhere?
Now listen, it’s almost July, and I still don’t know my way out of you,
The colors of your eyes
Have now slipped through the holes in my pockets
Along with your memories.
Now, all that lingers after you is your absence in the spaces you have left.
So, tell me If I write about you in shades of your mahogany hair,
And imagine you in colors I have never known,
Will you belong to me? If you don’t read this, whom would I belong to?