These Men Say

These men they say

    Just trust me

They touch their ears
   Their chins
   Frantic tics
Fingers that fly up
   Denying the words
Or lending them strength?

     Stroking coarse hair on their jaw
Or grooming their eyebrows with the pad of a thumb

   Legs kick
           Involuntarily
    Toes bounce
Within brown loafers with leather tassels
     I think are ugly

That flutter
That telltale rhythm

    I'm not like the others

These men say.
   As their brown eyes melt
   Into a hundred pairs
   A thousand
Blue and green and silver and earnest
    As they preach this gospel

This anthem.

    And we sit.
   Unbelievers.

But we sit in silence.

We are hoping to be proved
   That there is truth
That they are different
    That they are not like the others
       That we can give in

To these wild bright fantasies
    Car rides in the summer
And lasagna dinners on wooden tables
  Warm hands at night
This fantasy where words are what they mean
 
   Where truth is truth.
   And we gain wisdom from each broken love affair
Not bitterness.
   Not coldness or hardness.
      Not that edge to our eyes
         Not that subtle clenching of the jaw
We disguise with a smile
We're prettier when we smile
    So we smile tightly and we pluck
At split ends, at sweater fibers, at the napkin on the restaurant table.
   While his fingers are floating to his face
A face we want to love
   To trust
       To believe
To be different
    From every other face
That sat across from us and spilled lies
              Or truth?

But it is our odyssey to
    decipher
It is our journey
     to learn.

And we sit
    With fake smiles and tight stomachs

   While they are outraged
Or hurt
    Or sad
Or wounded or gentle or disgusted

That we don't drink these words we have heard a hundred, a thousand times,
 
      without worry that we are being slowly poisoned.