Romance 2.0

I.

I remember the thrill
when I saw your facebook status said "single" again.
Illusion can do that.

In the old days, you'd have had a tower built for you.
Oh, don't deny it.
You, with your diamond blonde curls
framing your lithe fox's face
like a pharoah's headdress,
your movement like a caged tiger or a mad eagle,
are the sort of person who gets things built:
the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin.

In those days, I would be a knight,
seeking your tower in the woods,
performing great feats to be allowed access at last.

Now, and tomorrow, your castle is in the air
and the weapons I am granted--
smiles, nods, murmurs,
likes, lists, lines, losers--
are harder to wield
(and no match for a good blaster at your side, kid).

Tomorrow you surround yourself with walls of facebook,
lines and boxes and a thousand gleaming smiles
projected onto the eyeballs
of a thousand boys
look at a thousand carbon copies
of you in your adorable blue bikini.

Your walls are guarded
by an army of likes
and by a thousand gleaming comments
given liberally, the way a good princess
should distribute her wealth. I'm sure I can
see through your walls,

see the soul
beneath your limning jewels, see the sadness
lurking in your heart
as it lurks in the heart of every person.
I think that if I stare
long enough at your status, your list of likes and loves,
the pictures of you
in a dress, in pajamas, in a bikini and always
wearing your diamond glimmer smile,
I will soon see what everyone
has missed, a negative image
formed by white space
stripping the jewels, the glim and glitter,
wrecking your walls down.

II.

That night we spent beneath the stars,
not wrapped in each other's bodies,
or in each other's souls,
but our spirits sleeping together,
is one I will write about forever.
You turned away from me that night,
though I didn't know it yet.

How to put that on facebook?

Tonight I wove a web of magic words,
caught a glimpse of a woman's
soul, experienced the greatest sense of loss
of my admittedly young life,
saw the moon dissolve, calcinate, mortify,
and burst alive, discovered
that the philosopher's stone is a process,
never an event.

If you can identify, click like.

III.

The truth is.

The truth is this.

The truth is, when I looked between the lines,
beneath the glimmer, beyond the blue of the bikini
and the blue of facebook's banner,
when I tried to find you,
all I could find was myself.

Like swimming the moat of the castle,
slaying the dragon, taking the secret passage
to the central chamber, and finding a mirror.
In that mirror I saw myself,
rat-whiskered, pig-tailed, and bleeding.

So when you turned away from me
in that black-and-white park
to project your technicolor smile
on the world, I let you go.
But it was not for your sake. It was for mine.

After all,

facebook is not about connecting,
it's about projecting.

IV.

As if there's anything you want to hear from me.

As if.

But if I could, I would tell you this:
Remember how the moon
smiled on us that night. Remember
how we realized the sky was not black,
but a deep purple different from any color
humans have captured. Remember
the way your hair shone in the moon,
as if you swam in moonbeams.

There is grace in everything, dear. In everything.
I have struggled for a long time
to find the grace between us,
but that's because it wasn't there.
We can't project grace onto each other.
If we could, it would be a business transaction,
like facebook. We can't put grace into a status update,
and if we make it one of our favorites,
it will burst that bond and swallow us
so that we know it not
beyond the pain of our own calcination.

Look for the grace, dear, and it will blind you.
Let it. Go blind.

It's the only way to see.