Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Going on a tangent

Another poem written for a friend (though this one didn’t ask for it). If you’re reading this and you’re human, it’s for you, too.

 

How to Tell a Friend What They’re Missing

Your smile is a gift to the universe.

Just what that smile is doing here, though–

now, that’s the question.

You ask it every day. Your mirror

is a shallow conversationalist. What does it tell you?

Who you are is not a picture.

No glass can comprehend your being.

And you wouldn’t expect it to, since,

after all, that knowledge escapes even you–

who lives behind the smile,

the space you occupy so small, two fists together,

yet so unknowable

like the space between two magnets

with the same charge.

You know what an echo sounds like

inside your head.

 

I can say all this about you

because I’ve heard it too, the dim flickering

of the question of existence. I can say, too,

that maybe there’s no answer

quite complex enough to satisfy it.

Maybe, instead, the answer is quite

a simple one. That you are here,

along with your smile,

because someone knew the world could use its luster.

You were His thought, who couldn’t help

but give you a heart and a question which,

once asked, would find an answer as simple

(unknowable)

as love.

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