One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

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I danced for decades with lies,

led across a scuffed-up floor

leaning on an unfaithful shoulder.

 

Those lips so lush with promise?

I tasted their sophisticated fictions,

perjured myself by believing

their candied catchphrases,

allowed my feet to be carried

across dancehalls and ballrooms

into spaces I knew better to enter,

as if I’d lost

the capacity to walk away.

A thirsty dog will gulp down

tainted water—and I drank

of the cloying poisons with relish.

 

Those hands so duplicitous,

one encasing mine like a lock box,

the other driving the small

of my back like a spike.

I told myself I had no choice,

conditioned as a prisoner

toward a cell I myself constructed

and latched shut. Why did I feel

the need to swallow the only key?

 

These bare feet have followed

the pulsing of those lips,

the cadence of those hands,

the rhythms of seduction and sedation.

I alone have worn this bittersweet path

through the grains beneath my feet,

every sliver earned, owned, deserved.