A world without (rough)

What choice have we but to love?
When you offer yourself so bravely
should we analyze the whys and hows of how
and why you came to be this way?
When you trust so fully that you are beautiful
who are we to deny it to ourselves?

I could not live in a world where a song sung to the crowd was a crass gesture,
where my advances only signaled desperation.
Where dreams were madness and not truth. Where knowing the things inside you
made you ugly to me. To the world.

And I say: it is not so.

So sing your songs. I will listen
and hope to understand. I will dance with you
whether you ask me to or not. If you ask for love,
I give it freely. For the alternative is a world without.

Another round for loves lost (Draft II)

Another round for loves lost
And loves never won. I'll drink to that - and only that.
To happiness drawn from all those unspoken truths.
To the gleeful reflection on might-haves and maybes
and the loneliness and heartache of the has-beens and never-weres.
The highs and lows of my imaginings
erode not at the liver, but the soul -
still, they could just forge anew
that lonely shoal.

The world is stupid and so am I
It's 3 hours and several millenia past midnight and
we still don't know the words.
That was my dream. My poets dream:
That, given enough time and a desperate enough hour
I'd find it in me to say the things that
have to be understood.
That I could show us that the person we don't know
is as important as the people we do,
that one life holds all the potential of the next.
That being yourself doesn't mean
never changing – that the opposite is true.
That the choices we made are never wrong.
Never. Because we made those choices.
I wanted to be a hero, maybe even a god.
I wanted to change your mind. I wanted to change mine.
I was a child.

We're still fumbling at the words, still arguing
over their meaning. We don't know what we want to say.
I can't find it in me to tell you how I'd change myself for you
and be happy with those changes.
How my heart beats fast at the prospect.
How my mind speeds and circles with the possibility
but can't quite master the timing.
How etiquette and protocol have fucked us, fucked us, fucked us,
when we don't know we are trapped within it.
Even when we do.

I thought that words were forever until I learned that I was wrong.
It took no time at all for the old English to become exactly that.
In a dozen millenia all I thought eternal will be gibberish on the wall, dialects forgotten,
loved only by wizened lexicographers and corpses, in that order.
I say love, and it means
something other than what it did before.
And maybe, still, something old. But only just.
It won't hold you here with me.
And I don't know that it should.
I don't know.
But I'm here with you anyways,
mute,
mouthing the words to what I think is
your favorite song.