I knew you were
Something
special
One year
Eight months
And nine days ago when I first saw your beauty
soaring over social norms with gilded wings;
You could never touch the ground.
Your laugh made my skeleton smile.
Your perfume blurred my affections.
I wondered what your skin would feel like
How your feathers would tickle my fingertips
How your waist would fit beneath my arms
but the word gay
was absent from my vocabulary.
We were friends who held hands in public
And bought each other ice cream
And danced to Mumford and Sons in the town square until the day
Your lips whispered “what if”
"what if we"
"what if"
we kissed
to mine
and your mind decided it was time to play harp on my heartstrings.
I thought the song was sweet then
Now I can see that all the notes were sour.
One moment I was convinced that maybe I had a glimpse of who I was
and the next it fled out of my vision
I didn't know what I felt or
who I was or
how I got to this position.
My skin with crawling with the word “lesbian”
My tongue shaking as it rolled out of my mouth like a sin
My bones quaking when I saw my pastor
Wondering if he could see my faults through my eyes.
I spent six weeks
wrestling with the taste of your bubblegum
crawling toward my closet
An Auschwitz prisoner to my Nazi insecurities,
All while your fingers clutched on your bible and
you flicked your wrist up
When you saw me coming to you Sunday morning
I lost the road map to the two way relationship street.
Blue light stinging my retinas and
Seventeen hours in a metal box
Made me comprehend
Rebellion.
You owe me every kiss that I crushed on your lips
Every moment I stole from my relationships to be with you
Every fluid ounce of my soul I poured into those poems
Every night you pressed your tongue down a guys’ throat on my couch
And I’m taking back every breath I gave you
after you declared your parents to be smothering.
You used me to have a break from your Baptist branded Christian living,
To get a little pleasure, a little rush from
the forbidden fruit of my body
You led me on to become a key
Just around to open
the locks surrounding stereotypical southern existence
I am not an object
And I will never allow you to reduce me to begging for you
When I was obviously
Nothing
Special