2018 / poetry / author
JOHN MAURER
STARRY AFTERNOON
…
One day you will wake up and the pain
you thought would never end will be found nowhere
I either don’t care about you enough to lie or I care about you too much to lie
But flowers like me are too busy blooming to waste sunlight putting you in the dark
But a pathetic shadow puppeteer is drowning in my shadow so it’s dripping out of her eyes
While I write this, I hear you throwing glass at my stone house
While your inkwell dries up and you sleep as your dreams disappear
I burned my dictionary to keep me warm, so I just rewrote it with healthier lungs
Remixing their sacred texts into erotica; taking the skeletons out of your closet
Dressing them in your clothes, do you feel like you can read the tea leaves?
Better things than money do in fact grow on trees
but your drooling jaw is too busy counting things
To crosscut the tree in your eye, to count its rings
To return to your homeland and treat it like Saturn
But you don’t need tarot or astrology to see
that the apology you are waiting for
is never coming back around into the corner booth
of that café you thought you might die in
That you wanted to die in