Love is a tricky thing

(I love finding inspiration in the work of others and playing off each other. A friend who sympathizes with me wrote a poem; she is responsible for this.)

This is what happens when you

find all the drops that you couldn't pour into

your boyfriends and lovers.

All those drops, the last ones that

kept you upright, rippled

one by one in blue waters.

While you give them away,

you don't notice the strength

leaving your body. You don't 

realize that the outcome is complete

vulnerability. 

And when you used to be a stone,

impenetrable by the knives and

winds of novelty or of change

or by whatever actually intangible things

about which we write poetry,

you are now water, too. 

Infused with love--

sweet, saccharine love.

You are just as much of a father as you are a mother.

My eyelashes are the crushed butterfly

wings that used to kiss her

blue children good night.

I am the old stitches coming out of

ragged blue jeans. 

But they have been resewn before,

they will do it again.

And sometimes they break a bottle

over the ship and it feels like

it was your head.

And I will be proving somebody right,

you say, and I can hear the lies

and bullshit drip through your teeth.

My sons and daughters deserve every

bit of joy and applause they encounter.

But only them.