December 19
ALMOST TWINS
You and I are more alike than different yet we cannot get
along, though I ponder why this surprises me so. A cloud and a watermelon are 98% the same and
no one would mistake them in a crowd or expect them to be companionable except
in the way of two things existing in the universe. My expectation of liking you for our
similarities is set up by my fear that I don’t like myself, but the joke is on
me. My dislike of you is not a
reflection of anything but time and space.
My friends are the people who like me, not necessarily the ones who are
like me. The president didn’t like
broccoli without slurring its good name and I can dislike you without inferring
you’re a vegetable.
Enjoy the approach
as well as the work.
*
Scalene
Strangeness is attracting, I don’t try to deny it.
I have looked longingly at oddness
and every skewed thing.
Though I try to divert my gaze the acute angles
draw me back to peer again and again.
Strange attractors have an unexplainable beauty to me.
The wane charisma digs its hooks into my soul
and I carry it off like a burr stuck to my hide.
What does this say of me, I am not sure?
What does it say of the sidelong loves of mine?
Volumes, I think it speaks volumes,
all of it unknown to me.
You are reading selections from Sober on the Way to Sane
and More Lines From My Life by Sherrie Theriault
