Learning to Play
The heartfelt chords of clarinets never
could complement the modern pop rhythms
inside my head. Remember when you once
had played for me in sunset blues and pinks?
I still recall those earthy sounds – so brave.
I did not know that music could become
substantial like a flooding rain after
a year of drought – or fire scarring homes.
The fractured reeds now play off-key. Forget
the classical; I miss the easy days
of pop. Our rhythms are always out of time;
my forced rhymes and your clarinet always clash.
Irrevocable
Your skin is soft like the velvety blanket I slept with
as a child. As I lay in bed with you, I wonder how skin could remain
so untainted. The tiny hairs along your arm do not distract; they are hardly seen.
The freckles are splashed against your brown flesh like waves upon a rock,
but they never erode it. Your complexion has no blemishes or stretch marks.
I pause to ponder that perhaps it is not that your skin is without its imperfections
but, instead, it is the way in which your skin heals over time.
It has not always been untarnished. It simply fights away all things that seek to damage it.
It polishes itself and shines despite adversity. And then I pause again
and look at my own skin. The hair, though soft, would not be falsely characterized
by calling it fur. The freckles are splotched, misshapen, and discolored
like a famous painting poorly remade by an amateur. The stretch marks spread
across my stomach and legs, deep like a river. And the scars reach around my
curves like a mountain range. I am not perfection; I am utterly marred and blemished.
My skin, like my heart, does not heal with time.
But I smile because, somehow, there is something undeniably, irrevocably beautiful about that.