This Title: Love is a Pill Like You Wouldn't Believe by Misty Rampart

This Title

Love is a pill like you wouldn’t believe and I’m

Standing at the edge of a morning that does not

Remember night, for that was too long ago,

And I find myself in a room wearing nothing,

Here in this place where sunlight falls as unevenly

On the walls as it does my heavy bosom—

Ha! The paint peels like old laughter,

And the windows hum with the certainty of elsewhere,

A place that does not exist when you’re inside me, in- Side my mind, staying there forever like this old

Teacup, half full, growing colder despite my fire,

Nestled beside the patient weight of unread books,

Each page holding the slow ache of waiting

For its own discovery,

For a thumbprint, for a question, for the hush between sentences Like before you break open on my skin with a flash of flushed white,

While out in the street, someone is shouting a name

I have never known, but because you and I are the only ones in the world

I imagine it is mine and it’s you shouting it

Because the world is generous with projections—

And clouds above drift like forgotten letters, spelling short words Like who, what, where while the clocktower shivers with each hour’s passing,

Yet nothing changes except the angle of light and the footpath I might take back to you as

I walk, barefoot, from one end of the room to the other,

Listening to the groan of floorboards like you, about to cum, shouting things and

Telling stories of shores, of storms, of quiet dances no one else remembers like a time

When the air smelled sweeter instead of being covered with the taste of dust and possibility

As somewhere, who knows where, a dog barks twice,

And the city rearranges its pattern of noises like you try to do post-ejaculation and

And then I am not sure where I left my longing—

Because it’s all around me, sitting on my head or perhaps

Folded in the pocket of a winter coat,

Maybe pressed into a photograph,

Faded at the edges,

Its colors running like rain over the memory of a face (not mine, some other bitch’s)

And I wonder if nostalgia is a place or a direction,

Is that feeling of home just about the room, the sound, the person,

Or simply the act of recalling a similar mind you had once long ago

Like catching the glimpse of the postcards taped to the mirror:

Snowy mountains that never send invitations like

I do, wanting you so badly to come back like

My best friend or customer or whatever, sailing or flying over these

Oceans that offer nothing but distance as

I trace each outline of your remembered face with a finger,

Making silent, unintelligible promises to the future that

I know I will not keep because there’s just no way,

I’ll never have the time, not with you hunting and

Haunting between my sweet thighs, scented with

The skin of many lovers but belonging to you

Now, here, but beginning to fade like the bowl in the kitchen filled with softening fruit,

Bananas speckled, apples giving way to bruise—this is solid

Proof that even stillness is not static,

That change can happen quietly, and unlike your orgasm,

Without the spectacle of thunder or applause

As somewhere, a violin begins with a song with no melody,

Slipping like a string caught in the web of intention,

And I listen, letting the music gather

In the hollow of my chest,

Where all the unsent letters reside with the memories

Of all my past conquests, a place where

I imagine a conversation that never quite takes shape,

Words circling above like birds unsure where to land—

How strange it is,

That language can both reveal and conceal,

Can offer solace and build walls, or maybe doors, and

Perhaps I will open that door and walk outside,

Stand in the garden and let the wind decide

What becomes of my hair, much as you do with my happy body,

And the grass is wet, sighing with dew, like

The mess you left between my thighs,

Each blade bending under the small weight of existence,

Echoes of my name on stale air,

And time is not a straight line here—

It is a collection of moments, like all the cocks and balls

I’ve balanced over the course of years,

Each exclamation of joy a thousand snapshots scattered on the floor,

Some sharp with joy, others blurred with sorrow, and

I keep searching, keep sucking this heavy air and other things, as

I pick them up one by one,

Examining the fissures and the laughter,

The open windows and closed doors,

And I am reminded that even absence has a shape

Like the tip of your dick in the light as

Afternoon drifts in on the scent of bread from a

Neighbor’s oven where something good is cooking,

And someone laughs in the stairwell

And for a moment, I am part of their story,

Woven into the tapestry of ordinary magic—

The simple way people brush shoulders,

And the sad way the world continues,

Undaunted by my uncertainty, finding

This sordid comfort in repetition,

In the slow return of shadows across the floor,

Playing, like we play, diddling time in the ritual of light and dark,

Fearing but craving the knowledge that night will come to us

And with it, a gentle undoing

Of everything the day has stitched together, like your orgasm, just one

In a series of finales as

I sit, finally, by the window,

Watching the city’s pulse quicken as the sky deepens—

Streetlights flicker, cars hum their fume-filled lullabies,

And somewhere, another poem begins with a title

And ends in silence, like your haunting grunts of pleasure,

Just content to exist for a while

As nothing more than a ghostly presence—

Asking as a breath, answering like a question,

Teasing the possibility of a return

And love is like a pill you wouldn’t believe.