One Heart

One heart. I gave you one heart, six senses, nine lives, and ten ways out of my arms. I peeled my skin like a banana and offered myself up to your charms. I catered your buffet with my own innards, steaming hot like you asked me to. I ripped my wings apart and singed them in fire to be near to you. All I ever wanted was not to feel alone with you. I put a postage stamp on my heart, but forgot the return address. Didn’t realize you’d return to sender a damaged, crumpled mess. To find my heart again, I was left to sift amongst other rejects gathering mold in a musty basement waiting for an auctioneer’s screaming endorsement. Great bargain! Mystery inside! Pandora’s box, take what you find. I skinned my hide, tanned and stretched and burned and toughened ‘til I was all leather-like. I became a grayish brown hue; welcomed cancer just for a weak “I do.” I searched my pores for messages you might have written on me in sweat. Like candy heart thoughts, sweet lies giving me a sugar high and rotting cavity each time we met. But you spit me out before I could ever melt on your tongue. I sold my soul for the lot of your broken vases that once held flowers blooming wild with hope. I stripped my conscience bare as bones and tried to help you cope. I covered you with dreams and weeds, smothered you with space. I let you taste all my thoughts popping like raspberries bringing sleeping buds awake. I gave you shelter, let you run helter-skelter all across my lawn. I knew you were afraid of monsters, so I kept you up ‘til dawn. I wriggled like bait in the crook of your arm, caught on the hook of your tongue. I loved you like glue, turned black with caught flies until the moment you came undone. And still I wasn’t the one. You. You gave me nothing. You keep me running from goodbyes, words that trip and fall from mouths like rain on a day burdened by cloudless skies. Before drops hit the ground, they’ve already gone dry. You take me outside and beat the dirt clinging to every fiber of this old worn rug. I tried to stash myself in your chest of drawers, but you preferred me hung. I found myself amongst stale dreams moth-bitten and holy, coated with dusty hope. I found hidden in your pocket an old bar of soap noosed with rope. I guess you meant to cleanse yourself of all my dirty deeds. You wrote my story out in blotted stains of cinnamon coffee crumpled between folds of a napkin, sealed with burnt orange lip prints forever recording the lines of a thousand stolen, once shared kisses from back when I kept you pressed to me like a patriotic hand upon my heart. One heart. That was all I ever gave to you. One heart, and a bunch of other things that have already been forgotten and discarded.