Mimi - Mona Poetry: Mona Arizona's Poem HE

 “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.” — The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

©He

Mona Arizona

All Rights Reserved

He owned me like a watercolor,

or Sumi splashed across rice paper,

or a tumbling star thrown into the night

sky; just as one of a pair of dice

hits the edge hard, I rolled back stained

and every part of me vibrated from the

laughter of the next apple on the tree

who whispered in the mouse’s ear.

He cataloged my thoughts and moves

then set me to one side on the library

shelf of lust and love, mystery unsolved,

but too hyped up on the latest color

to recognize my tortured ring tone. Don’t

shed tears for this latest martyr; send me

to bed to dream of the end of monsters,

the Frankenstein monster of amativeness.

He bound me to his canvas with vermilion

games that mimicked expired antibiotics

and post-dated bit-coin hopes.

Be suspicious of crooked smiles,

of cowboys bearing apples, and of

wolves who enter a city of cobwebs

and lack the atlas of the spine, too 
afraid to beard the lion in her own den.

He emptied me like a worn suitcase,

strung me tauter than a violin’s strings,

yet never cherished me as though

I were one more hour of a Spring

day blended with the last days of

Autumn. The fat lady sang and
flashed him bits of cheesecake, but the

frightened mouse had screwed his last.