The Truth About Sympathy Poem by Tara Teeling

Tell me about your tragedy.
Spread it all over me,
layer over layer,
like buttercream frosting
on sponge-cake,
until any crumb of my own
is smothered beneath the
weight of your sorrow.
The odds of us sharing some
similar ruin are not as
high as say…a woman
over thirty-five getting killed
by terrorists before getting married?
Give me silvery music to whelm
the wailing of the night,
and wrap me in it,
plucking the strings of my
own suffering as you enswathe me,
tuning them to some pleasing, light opera.
I like you, might even love you,
yet there’s something undeniable about
the satisfaction of feeling exempt
from a condition worse than my own.
What is real is that neither of us
want to hear about the
greater circumstance of the other.
It lowers the loser’s odds considerably,
of ever overcoming.
This strange nature is the thing
which keeps us moving,
despite the laws of probability.