Tryst Poet: Mark Lipowicz

contents

She Would Insult Me

With her chemical vocabulary. “Allotrope”
she called me once, I had to look it up,
she meant another form of human being,
same elements but different substance, feeling.
”Your heart is charcoal, black dead carbon.
How could you sell it to me as a diamond?”

She grew more subtle as we aged together.
“Enantiomorph! You mirror-image isomer,
you're only the reflection of the man I wed.”
I nodded in agreement as we went to bed.
It’s true, the man whose face I see in the mirror
is not the same as the man who married her.

I’ve grown more patient, wise, considerate;
the younger man who married her was an idiot.

Mark Lipowicz works in business publishing in New York City, and used to be a writer for a technical magazine. He started reading and writing poems again a few years ago, and have been at it constantly since then.