dodging the bullet

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because i want to believe that love is a dark room we accidentally found
the door to, that both our curiosities got the better of us and we entered,
that afraid, you threw a knife at darkness’s thick veil, aiming to pierce it
open. and this is how you found me, by the light of a wound. blinded,
we collided, my soft body punctured by your sharp edges and i want
to believe if only you could have seen your own face, if only you had known
our proximities—the difference between an abrasion and a piercing—if only
this were not the danger and limitation of a metaphor, not what it illuminates
but what it conceals in a box unopened: your intentions and your reasons,
still somewhere in that room, a room that i have left and will never return to
even though we’ve torn the walls down and light is streaming in. let me confess:
who made that box but me? that box is this poem. my love—the ribbon tied
around it. i take the truth and dress it up in metaphors so i can stay in
the dark, because in the dark i can pretend the parts of you in the box are
beautiful and i can pretend my harm is just an accident, but loving you
was not an accident. you left this room unscathed, and that is not by accident.
look in the bottom of the box where we began. see our original sin. the truth
that expelled us from the room is in the difference: i came to this room unarmed.