Padding (Poem-A-Day 15)

For today’s prompt, we actually have a Two-for-Tuesday prompt:

Write a love poem. Love, it’s such a big 4-letter word that can mean so much to so many for a variety of interpretations. Friendly love, sexual love, dorky love, all-encompassing love, jealous love, anxious love, love beaten with a baseball bat, hot love, big love, blues love, greeting card love, forgiving love, greedy love, love in a music video, and so on and so forth.
Write an anti-love poem. Well, kinda like love, but take it back the other way.

Padding

I’m glad I can still get queasy
Anticipating a first date
It’s been a while

Reminds me of my youth
When everything was dreadfully important
Every question parsed for hidden meaning
Every answer fraught with consequences

I still want her to like me
Want to charm her
To feel that enchantment once more
But I won’t sacrifice who I am
For any more women

It’s not confidence
I’ve gained with age
It’s apathy
I’ve accumulated enough emotional padding
Through the years and divorces
To soften any blow

Just like the adipose padding
Around my waist

About Bartholomew Barker

Bartholomew Barker is an organizer of Living Poetry, a collection of poets in the Triangle region of North Carolina where he has hosted a monthly feedback workshop for more than decade. His first poetry collection, Wednesday Night Regular, written in and about strip clubs, was published in 2013. His second, Milkshakes and Chilidogs, a chapbook of food inspired poetry was served in 2017. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021. Born and raised in Ohio, studied in Chicago, he worked in Connecticut for nearly twenty years before moving to Hillsborough where he lives and writes poetry.

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