April Leavenworth: Sagacious, Brilliant, Annoying Bitch
The best part about this poem is that she won't even have to try to make it all about her (while pretending that she's not trying to do that, which is always really obvious to everyone).
Oddly bonded
With misplaced senses of nostalgia
And melancholy
Yet freakishly hopeful
We remain confidants, friends
Shaped by past and current traumas.
Regaled with her wryly dispensed
Weekender stories
And their repeating punch lines
That never astonish
Because of the simple reality:
Being loved equally hard is rare.
We laugh about a future on a porch
When she is old and I am older
And she will stomp her bare feet to say
‘I think I’ve met the one!’
And I will listen as she listened
When I said it for the last time decades earlier.
Bothersome that she is correct so often
Yet rarely applies her own advice given to others
That sharp mind, easily bored
Rapier wit in the mirror
In shadows, in public
Wounded, resilient, triumphant.
Judgmental not of each other
But ourselves, wholly and deeply
Masterful twins of insightfulness
Unhealed from the resulting incisions
Such brutal honesty dispenses
We trudge forward with fake smiles for the world.
And the eternal truth?
Existences as shiny, glittering palaces
That sparkle still on moonlit nights
As under the blaze of midday summer suns
When awestruck dreamers gaze at us in wonderment
And pray from afar of drawing nearer
As we feel ourselves disintegrate again.