This Poem is to Lose You

I repeat the word over and over to inspire myself: love.

I think of townhouses in a cold city where men

were absent though we were both present.

I think of the men who wrote my fate under their

soft gaze, who didn't wait with me for my cab home.

I think of hotel rooms and bitter remarks, fake laughter

and my dorm room rug, purchased though it was white

and could turn grey with stains. There was the man who

said my aura was orange, who made our relationship

a maze, intentionally losing me. Calling my father at

midnight, before I moved to Pacific Coast Time and

couldn't call him at all hours of the night. I think of my

sister, how she found love after years of sink holes and

dead ends. There are so many things that tie us back to our

initial demise. And yet, here in the dead of night, before

sunrise, there are songs that can change my brain chemistry

and make me fly. In the summer of my junior year of college,

I listened to the lightning that lit up her eyes and drank soda

because I couldn't yet stomach alcohol. I think of broken

homes, relationships in tatters after long nights of zero

attraction. After all of the crying, after I hated all of the

LA women for their luck in unflawed genes and ripped jeans,

I moved to that same state, for a man, so we could share the same

time zone. There is no amount of love that can save this poem,

and I realize that now, many words deep, many attempts

later at stabbing into the darkness, I am still that girl.

I will always be the girl who loved and lost, self-fulfilled,

bitterly writing poems that don't attract anything but flies.

Just like talent writes itself, my fate is written from up above.