NaPM, April 9, 2020

[Todd]

Stories Beneath a Dark Sky

We can only blow out the candle
and huddle beneath the empty night
because of the stories, we tell ourselves.
Tales that are so old we have to blow dust
from their clichés.

There was a girl who liked the dark.
She liked men with dark looks
and darker appetites. Older
men, possessing the secrets
of the world. Men her mother hated.

Her mother didn't just hate them for their age.
She was more grounded than her daughter, rooted
to her place in life. The girl might have listened,
but this is a story about foolish choices.

The girl fell down a hole—no other way
to describe it. She snuck away
for a candlelit dinner, and predictably
only ate half her food.

Some men still feel entitled.
You get a woman dinner
or even a pomegranate, and she owes
you half her life. It's a constant
like the seasons, summer to winter.

Again, this story is about foolish choices,
except it isn't. It's about the hole
we all fall down. It's about the candle
once blown that cannot be relit.

It's about winter to summer, but also
the spring in-between,
which belongs to someone else.
It is the story we tell ourselves
to imagine we have a choice.