Your Persuasion Poem by Tara Teeling

Your perfumed words and rose-petal theories
have long since lost their potency, as have you.
The wine has turned to water, and there is no
salt with which to tempt my tongue.

I may be foolish to have believed in the cherry red clouds,
the fluffy vessels that carried me above the indolence and
bloodlessness, suspending me in my own gentle reality.
My nails are black with the grit of clawing
the ground on which I dwell.

The evangelical counsel made an easy mark of me.
I reasoned that you were like the wind; I could feel you
and your power, though intangible and slight. Ephemeral.
I swallowed all of it, thinking I’d tasted honey,
waiting to drink more.

And then…

There was an uneasy calm. The silence squelched the music.
My face was smacked with shame for my lack of conviction.
I had attempted my own conversion of the other mirky souls
only to find that I had been preaching twice-chewed words.
These words that even you had never really trusted.

I crawl through each hour with skyward, darting eyes,
scanning for cherubs, on rippling red clouds and other signs
of fabled dogma. Though disenchanted, I still hoard some
sort of hope that the magic does exist.

It’s what keeps me breathing.