Intention

Michael Turle

You cry out your vague confessions in the space between hope and the horror  

that she might make sense of your maladaptation; 

that the awful secret of your love  

might spill over, unbecoming from your shoulders 

and relieve you of its awful weight  

that she might ever want you, too. 

You develop a Stockholm Syndrome for something that’s sold as solitude, 

learn to sip selfhood like wine— 

to get drunk on the sorrow of aloneness 

disguised as the joy of being alone. 

*** 

Every intention feels like a pretense, 

condescension or begging questions 

and many things that feel like begging— 

but she is kind and welcomes bridges, 

built towards some metaphor of love  

that doesn’t exist quite yet. At a minimum, I am thankful to her 

for her tenure, however brief,  

as a warmer kind of delusion. 

*** 

In my daydreams she is more than that 

and we share joints and smiles like thieves 

across the couch of an apocryphal apartment 

making tarot card tattoos kiss; 

she is finally happy with her job and I’m thinking of getting a cat 

and we’ll name it something stupid like 

“Bidet” or 

“Tax Evasion” 

and we’ll call her “Taxi” for short and worry 

about if she’ll eat our cactuses, 

but beyond that we have no worries— 

beyond that we are ok.