Glasshouses and Mudholes

i make wishes on blinking stars when i fear we’ll never meet, and place bets on racing cars for the hope i’ll one day climb to the tops of mountains with you. with dread i cling to hope like the seaweed to shores or the snow to summer hills. it grows loose and indifferent when it all begins to fade, so i find a million places you’re not in and bottle a billion scents that aren’t you, and i give you lives, i give us tragedies, i take the path most followed, and it takes me to places i’m supposed to go, but should i really be there if you are not? so i must gather myself like desert flowers and look over still waters like poets, a perfect place to cry, a perfect place to die, traced and laced with the tears of the explorers who never found their lovers here either. their bones are eyed by the lucky ones who stare on through glass houses and laugh into funnels of champagne from the whites of their mouths. they are adorned with christmas and summer gatherings while the lonely wither away at the mudhole, skinned and boned in beds half empty, wondering why they even have a bed at all.