If I asked you what you see in your future I’m sure
I’d only be met with silence.
Not because you don’t know where we’re going,
but because you know we won’t like it.
We’re not walking into any future we imagined,
together nor apart, in every way that’s meant.
Now it seems more like a slide into complicity,
acceptance, and “you get what you get,
and you don’t get upset” like we’re children
who never learned to play by the rules.
I suffer through sighs and the sad empty gazes.
You suffer metaphorical but actual pain in your heart,
days fighting vertigo, nights fighting bad thoughts
so you can hope for some sleep that comes hard.
But you dream more than me, I know because
you tell me, and I always wonder when you say “we”
in dreamtalk, which ‘we’ do you speak of? Which
woman haunts your dreams? Who, who, who?
And I never ask because I am afraid to know
it’s not me, it’s never been me, it’ll never be me.
She got prom, and Disneyworld, and drive-ins,
she got your children, your marriage, your endless devotion,
and anything else she probably ever asked you for.
I get:
“It’s nothing, I’m fine.”
”It’s nothing.”
”Nothing!”
So I don’t know how you never wonder why
I’m so scared one day you’ll leave me.
You wear your past so proudly on the front of your shirt
when you won’t give me real hope for a real future,
so really, how do you expect me to feel?
Today’s poem prompt words were: silence, vertigo, and drive-ins.
Today’s poem is also a rant, thanks for reading, sorry for ranting.