Love Poems In The Secretive Year Of 2022 Poem by Jack Otterberg

1.
I'm thinking we don't ask to be born
in this game.
the snowflakes flicker on your hair, and
that's that.
playing basketball, or watching New Girl,
we did not
understand the faces we'd leave behind.
what if aliens… Snapchats,
black screens, full screens,
four times in real life meeting,
once in January, the other for prom, the
other for your grad party, the last
for mine.
and then some other times in college.
I didn't think you'd be able to leave me.
I was wrong.

I should've been better to you.
shouldn't have taken you for granted,
as one may take the perfect air
of June nights lightly.
or seeing the pockmarks in the cement,
one may find they'll never find
the right words.

2.
trees don't love me anymore.
I've become a boredom to them.
walking into Cather I think how
I've got to let you go.
I texted you last night for the billionth
time without a response,
and I hate myself for it. I can't
forgive myself for being wrong—
that song with all too guilty notes
rings my ears at night.
the trees stoop down as I
walk through the gaping potholes
to the union where I saw you and
your sister looking at posters.

this isn't how it was supposed to end—
I'm convinced. I'm going back to my
room, letting the yellow light punch through
my eyes.
I'm writing you this in secret, as all
things have come to.

(secret 1) . I loved the way you tilted your head, especially that one time after track practice, when I handed you that
small yellow paper. and the clouds
piled through with their slow gray
bodies, perhaps hinting at
our end.


3.
we could walk back into that time—
though I know you don't want that.
thinking back to prom, you wore
your baby blue dress, pretending I
didn't exist. perhaps payback
for me asking you. you were too kind.
I too possessed by an idea.

(secret 2. this life isn't worth it anymore
if I can't talk to you about it's meaning.)

I sit up in my chip-crumbed bed,
waiting for the dead to lock me in their
dreams.
a key, a credit card, a list of unanswered prayers.
I'm going back to that place I forgot the shape of my words.
that's that.