I Beg Of You Not To Love Me
By Kathy Parker
And you, with lips that bleed with the sacrifice of your heart.
I beg of you not to love me.
Find a girl whose contours do not snag beneath your touch, who has not traded her tears for thorns, her skin for armor.
A girl who does not forgo sleep to map escape routes on the back of her eyelids, but instead makes her home below the shelter of your collarbones.
Make sure her constitution has been stitched together with straight lines and even spaces; that she has not been woven remiss with paradox and inconsistency, both the hurricane and the shelter, the illness and the cure.
A girl who does not bleed alcohol and exist in metaphor.
Whose stories can be read in journals impressed with seaside daisies and late summer memories, not scrawled in jagged scars upon her skin.
A girl whose worth is not rich in the currency of shame and apologies.
Who does not wrap her fragile shell in a bandage of words, hoping to hold intact chalky bones that threaten to crumble away with sadness.
Who says she is fine.
She is not fine.
Do not believe the poets; the ones who tell you there is beauty in brokenness, who swathe ugly truths in pretty words and label it art, like virtuosity will ever be enough to soak the bloodstains off the floor.
There is no beauty in brokenness.
Only broken inhabits brokenness.
Do not love a girl like me, a girl too inept to be trusted with such precarious birth.
Who does not understand love when it has only been spelled as goodbye.
Who knows the taste of trust only as kisses from a razor-blade tongue.
Who does not know how to exist without one foot stretched out, holding the door ajar.
Do not love a girl like me who drapes herself in garments of tough pretense to belie the vulnerability beneath.
A girl like me, whose untamed heart betrays me with its wild abandon at the wanting in your eyes; who does not know how to love in half-measure but only with the magnitude of the entire universe that gathers within my flesh.
No, do not love a girl like me.
Find a girl who is sure-footed and able.
For I,
I am too familiar with my own heart; the delicate glass of which it is fashioned, so susceptible to causing us both to bleed should it shatter beneath the weight of your fingers.
What I mean to say is, I am so afraid of love,
I would rather not love at all.