I think of poems as Tupperware containers
holding food from the dinner I just held.
It’s a takeaway,
so that when we’re no longer in the same home,
you have a reminder
of the laughter that echoed off these walls.
I write them because I want to give you a snack
for those small hours of the night;
when your insides are grumbling—
that emptiness gnawing at you—
just for a feeling different from your nameless wanting.
I’ll even give you takeaways in my good Tupperware,
because I want you to come around again,
to drop it off on a random day.
(I can’t create a better excuse to see you.)
But more than that,
I give you the good Tupperware
because even if you take it
and I never see it again,
I know that in the back of your cupboard,
emptied out,
scratched and scuffed by time,
there is something other than me
that remembers the love from this night.
Recommendation: Ars Poetica in Which the Poet Is Not a Cockroach by Jason Myers; (Ars Poetica).