Platonic Admirer

Graphic by Naima Mark

I can’t say that I love you anymore,
but I can say, with confidence,
that you are one of the few things in this world 
that makes me want to create.
A feat almost synonymous,

and, some would say, even more ambitious than love,
because your existence alone spurs electricity from my head to my hands
and forces me to cook ideas from a pure and amorphous state of indescribability
and put them into shitty teenage poetry,
like my mind is an at-home meth lab—you’ve intoxicated me.

You have made me into an admirer in the past and the present,
a baronet donned with the responsibility of leaving my kingdom
and traveling afar to tame the beasts of sensations 
that stubbornly refuse to be broken into feeble human words
to gain my knighthood.

Creatures once thought of as untamable
now trot on blacksmithed hooves of words,
don sturdy reins of stanzas,
and flaunt beautiful caparisons of poetry
as I ride them home.

And while I may not have tamed their ancestors, glorious beasts
who wreaked havoc on the lands and themselves simply because they were not
fed with love, I am quietly accepting of this tamer species,
quelled with the acceptance that they will not find this food either,
and beautiful enough to be admired anyway.