The Version of Me Next to Her
The Version of Me Next to Her
I'm sick of this venerable man, worn like a heavy mask,
a brooding pseudo-philosopher, hiding in cold, foreign coffee shops,
reading translated philosophies, a wall of words sharp as glass,
silently judging everyone, just to guard my fragile ego.
I was a prisoner in my own mind, years spent playing a tiresome role,
watching other people's lives through glass, a cold witness at the world's feast,
bored to the marrow of my bones with my own scholarly shadow,
a lonely shepherd over a flock of thoughts long since dead.
But when she appears, my suffocating armor melts like wax in fire,
the walls fall silent, my irony turns to ash and smoke,
I stop weighing the void of the universe, and laugh in wild fits
in the middle of a crowded aisle, over some small, sweet joke.
She pulls me from the dark cave of a mind endlessly chewing itself,
pushes me into a radiant, upside-down world, humming with color,
for the first time I'm not standing behind the frozen glass,
watching others live — I am living, palms open to the sky.
It's terrifying that I have no control — she makes me goofy, makes me alive,
makes me care about things stripped of irony and clever theory,
as if she'd driven a lightning bolt straight into my chest, warm and sudden,
and I, long dead, woke up — obsessed with the man who only exists with her.
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