I don’t want to eat,
I want to sit around being fragile
And subsist on sparkling water
I want there to be something left in my day
That glitters.
I want to turn the internet off, open the windows,
And listen to yesterday’s thunderstorm.
I want the rain to wash the sidewalks away with the hours,
To return me to the twilight of yesterday, before we…
I want to do yesterday over again:
To do nothing. To do more, to do less,
To speak up when I was hurting.
When you were hurting me.
I want to have never started, or to have lingered
In the moment, after the first time I asked you to stop
Before I said “Where is the dominant guy who threw me over the desk?”
I want to have stayed there- in your surprisingly gentle arms,
To have fallen asleep.
I want to be the worst kind of hypocrite, I want a cigarette.
After your tobacco breath and all my complaints-
I want to hang my head out the window and blow the smoke into the January air,
Watch it curl toward the cobblestones on the courtyard
Like a woman descending spiral stairs.
The French have a word for this. Usually, it’s the Germans,
Coming in with vocabulary lacking in English.
But today it’s the French:
L’espirit de l’escalier
The ghost of the things we should have said.
I have so much left to say to you.
I want our story to keep going, too.
…
An addition to the poem:
I remembered tonight that my ultimate dream vacation
A trip aboard the Orient Express,
Runs from Istanbul
to Paris.
Maybe one day we will go.
Maybe one day I will look back and realize I was always heading toward you.
Give me validation.