One True Thing

If you love someone
right now,
here’s the practice.

And I’m asking you
to actually do it.

Say one true thing tonight
that the mask
would have handled.

Not the flood.

One thing.

“I’m scared about work.”

“I’ve been somewhere else lately.”

“I miss you,
and I don’t know
when that started.”

A few words of crack,
showing through the rock.

Then stay.

Don’t fix it.

Don’t perform around it.

Just let them meet

the real one.

I lost seven years
of no matter what,
protecting a woman
from the one thing
she’d already promised
to hold.

Don’t run my experiment.

The data’s in.