TO BE A BETTER LOVER
When I said I loved you, I should have tattooed your name on my chest in place of my mother’s.
When I said I loved you I should have consistently sent handwritten letters.
When I said I loved you and wanted a better life for you I should have paid for your therapy sessions or introduced you to the ever-healing ‘grandmother’.
Instead of telling you how much I still loved you after a big fight, I should have pulled you closer to feel my warmth but I slept away from you and created doubt.
When you told me I wasn’t paying you any attention I should have spent less time on my phone and given you my full attention. Instead, I went on IG to post a picture of you.
When you told me you missed me and wished I was right there in the room. I should have booked a flight that minute instead of just saying I missed you too.
When I said I loved you we should have made mini versions of us to have physical proof of said love.
Now, all that remains are the messages and the fleeting words that occasionally revisit my memories but only for a brief moment.
To my next lover-
I’ll borrow Zeus’ strength and Autolycus’ trickery to extract all the love in heaven to mend your heart. Then maybe you will have enough to reciprocate my love. I will sing your praises and courageously make sacrifices. For if I had a son I would give him up like God did or act faster than Abraham and not wait around for any voice to fuel my hesitance. Everything will be alright again. If it isn’t enough and my lover still feels cold from previous trauma I’ll burn the world to give her the slightest warmth.
5 Comments
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Major Mimi
Wow, reading this hit me hard. The way you laid out those moments of realization and missed chances, it’s like you’re baring your soul. We’ve all been there, wishing we could turn back the clock and do things differently in love, And that ending, borrowing Zeus’ strength and burning the world for warmth—that’s some powerful dedication to making things right
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Nedu
This was a prompt to mean what you say. Nowadays we say a lot of things that we do not mean or act on. And this reflects in almost every aspect of our lives. The beginning of change is truly how you love. Being a better lover. It’s always the simple things but the scars are too deep, it reminds you truly of the heart of man. *note to self*
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Rubi Drake
Please don’t say …I’ll burn the world. The apocolyptic fervour to bring it about screams through every news headline as if to reassure this generation that they are so unique that they are priveleged to be part of its demise and take part in its consumer driven descent to its completion. Hope is what we need. Our own sense of hope not borrowed from the past to refer to dead heroes that mean nothing to us. I’ll borrow Zeus’ strength and Autolycus’ trickery. Every artist borrows. We all know that is true. Yet there remains a little twist. What we borrow and adapt what we borrow, to make it a part of our own, is what we fashion into a new weapon that we equip ourselves with. You write with a direct honesty that is admirable. I look forward to what you can borrow to make it your own…in your own words. Mythmaking is what we all live. Here’s mine. Cheers to you young soldier. A new battle appears on the edge of the horizon. Ready!
I am Karma Love Kid. I couldn’t care less.
I’m gonna create a stir. I’m gonna make an unholy mess.
What I am about to do, you’ll never feckin’ guess.I’m going to jump on you as time slips through every shopping mall
with my Purple Cat who walks by himself and neither cares at all.
I’m dangerous in front of mirrors. My light reflects off everything that you see.
On a fine sunny day if I feel like it, you can catch a glimpse of me.
A split second white silent eye blinks back at you squinting in the sun.
You’ll turn your head and look twice but now you’re on the run.You won’t see anything except a flash of light.
Crossing the street can be tricky if you bump into me for a fight.
Brakes fail and cars crash in my wake as I turn a corner
I swivel signposts around you just for fun and disorder.
Traffic lights change for no apparent reason.
The consumer driven nightmare is out of season.Hello. KLK. Whaddya say? I’m KLK. Let’s go all the way.
Suspension bridges heave and creak under my dancing feet, snapping cables with groans and squeaks. Drivers abandon their cars and scratch their heads, confused by the fact that a shopping trip will only ever be a list, on a crumpled piece of paper in a back pocket
Fire hydrants pop their valves shooting up rainbows into the air for Karma kids to play in.
The pavement beneath my feet erupts into a river of marscapone rippling with each step I take as Purple Cat surfs beside me. Christ the Redeemer in Rio De Janeiro starts to do the Boogaloo. On Mount Rushmore, USA. The faces of Presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt come alive and bellow out a barbershop version of the chorus from We gotta get out of this place. The Statue of Liberty offers me her torch and breaks out into a Fox Trot. Big Ben chimes out the last call for the Empire to fall.
Rodin’s thinker in Paris stands up and yells out, I doubt therefore I think I am. So he stomps off for a glass of absinthe in Montmartre. In Sichuan China, the Leshan Giant Buddha stands up to reach 10 stories high and marches off to Beijing to give the high up bastards a piece of her mind about what they are doing in Tibet. Purple Cat clicks a claw and the Sphinx rises up in awe, shaking off all the dust of thousands of years to stretch and arch its back.
I’m releasing all of the caged animals from your local Zoo. I quickly teach our not so distant cousins how to unscrew the bolts of their cages and by their own ingenuity, close the gates behind them, so that no one will immediately notice their foray into the local community and they follow my Purple Cat licking his fur into violet flames that leave trails of sparks in the air.
You’ll meet giraffes headbutting traffic lights. Chimpanzees clamouring over car windscreens hooting and screaming at the occupants. Some of our escapees gain even wider notoriety when I give them a voice of their own on a social platform. Solly and Slippy, the Sulawesi crested macaques become quite a hit with millions of online supporters calling for their right to freedom. Booking restaurant tables for a candlelit romantic vegetarian dinner. Ordering online take aways of a Plantain Bean stew for two.
And as for Lars, Lucy, Loony and Luka, the runaway long tailed Lemurs stealing smartphones, tripping up postal workers on their rounds, boarding trams all over the city, on their illicit sightseeing tour to pilfer from the grocery stalls, raiding the popcorn machines in cinemas and lock picking mopeds, racing to the outdoor terraces to have food fights. What dexterous mischievous creatures. You won’t believe the fun they have with a Fettuccine Alfredo.
Naturally, we head towards the shopping mall. Cheering on the rhinos causing a terrible ruckus in a carpark jousting with SUVs. Inside the mindless shoppers of the consumer driven nightmare pause mid-stride, their faces frozen in expressions of surprise and confusion as the world around them disintegrates into a pantomime of grotesque proportions. The digital billboards with pouting trout faced models transform into winking hairy baboons on high heels.
The blank faced mannequins come alive smashing the window panes and assemble together to perform sidesplitting disco dance routines under shimmering glitter balls. Any of the security staff who approach them to halt this madness are simply tapped on the shoulder and they join in step to the rhythm. What am I going to do next?
Time will bend to my will. I will bend will to my time. I am a god who is becoming. I am the becoming of a god. The emergence of my shape is you. You are the emergence of my shape that is true. I am going to give you a voice to sing and what a bell it will ring. -
XMC.PL
Reading your work felt like discovering a new language — one that speaks directly to the heart while still offering intellectual depth.
Olatubosun Adekunjo-Ajibogun
Nice Piece Bro