A Response: Beat

These tawdry designs you disdain,

worn now and dried to rusty scrawls

on a wall too high to climb,

are the record of my failure,

not to scale it, but to know that

it was eternally unscalable.

The bouquet of ifs and maybes

have been long since pressed

into the pages of a pillow book

of things that cannot be had

for love, or time, or any price.

The truth of me was always here,

in each of a thousand bruises,

in the million unkissed pulses,

in the many years of constancy.

But you cannot set free what

you haven’t captured, love.

You kept me in exile,

but we are always our own jailers.

 

(A ‘pillow book’ (Makura no Sōshi) was a ancient Japanese list of things that belong together, organized by season, emotion, or whim)