First posted on Facebook (12/26/2017). I decided to post here because it’s easier to find things here than on Facebook. Here’s evidence that I do not have a future as a poet laureate.
Every One of Us
If your eyes are the windows to your soul,
they reveal a secret so deep and private that
I’m embarrassed to see, yet I can’t help but
be transfixed by your eyes, those eyes that
are transfixed by mine.
If your heartache spills through those
windows, I can’t help but reach for your
heart and your hand, hoping to stem the pain
that shreds your happiness into sharp shards of
indescribable loss.
We share something, you and I, something
ugly and beautiful and impossibly deep,
a truth with undiminished beauty that
opens wounds of love and heals the hate
that makes us brittle.
Living in this world is so deeply hard, yet
there is no place else we’d rather be than
here, with each other, two lighthouses on
fire in the darkness, two secrets who can be
shared only among the two of us.
Who are we, we wonder, who are these two
elements of the periodic table, these two
fragments of emotion that spill from the lips and
hearts of every man and woman we know?
It’s us, just us, every one of us.
