Ghosts Are Real

Today’s poem is a revision of one I posted a while ago. I kept a few lines from that poem, Sleeping With Ghosts, to create this:

Ghosts aren’t real, she told me while settling

her naked body into the crook of arms belonging to

the corpses of loves that never should have been.

She made pillows out of the faces of men

who’d crushed her dreams like the sweet, hard candies

she used to hold in her cheeks, savoring when she was a girl.

At night while she sleeps she remembers

how easily she had been discarded, her love

wrapped in the recycled news found in a trash bin &

used to wrap dead fish, with unseeing eyes, fish that’s

no longer fit for consumption. And her tears fail to wash

away remnants of the ghosts of yesterday so they continue

to keep her awake. Still she keeps them near, their familiarity

seemingly enough to keep her from beginning to dream

things could ever be different. That’s how she convinced herself

that ghosts aren’t real & that love is nothing more than

grasping hold to what doesn’t want to be held.