I declare myself a rationalist-
With great pride and a smug smile,
Very carefully ignoring
This strange yet familiar longing
For something kinder,
Something more soothing than the truth
And the ridiculous existential questions
That confront me at every such declaration:
What is life
Without poetic exaggeration
And innocuous lies
On the eternality of beauty, love
And such rubbish?
What is life
Without foolish sentimentality,
Old paper plane notes
And wilting carnations and roses
Pressed safe in the yellowed pages
Of the kind of books
One never finishes reading?
What is life
Without unreasonable faith
In promises we’ve always known
To be impossible to keep,
Their fates sealed to fade away
As messages bottled
And lost in shipwreck?
What is life
Without words that never find their way
Out of tortured minds,
Escaping only once in a while
As nonsensical verse
Of a lonely insomniac
Set to the irksome rhythm
Of a rusty typewriter
At the darkest hour of the night?
And what is life now,
Without the lies your lips once traced out
Against my skin every night?
Nothing.