FAMILIAR GAZE

That familiar gaze

Under the summer haze

Sending me into a daze…

What more can I say?

 

That familiar gaze

With that stupid face

And that silly grin

All my life, where have you been?

 

That familiar gaze

I’ve seen it before

Day by day

But now we’re offshore

 

That familiar gaze

But you looked away

As the sun fades

And the season changed

 

That familiar gaze

Slipping thin from memory

Your stupid face decayed

No longer a reverie

 

That unfamiliar gaze

Turned bitter like that peach we tasted

And my peach-stained hands still tainted

With the image of us left in the patches of that pinkish tint

 

Published in Matcha Spill Magazine for their Mini Issue: SALTWATER SOLSTICE

Stupid fun fact: this poem was inspired by a fanfiction I wrote in High School. (The fanfiction was about Will Graham if you’re curious. No. I won’t be showing it.) It has the same title and same “vibe”, the difference is that said “vibe” in the ending of this poem is depressing and non-existent in the fanfiction. You can imagine the first two stanzas as the premise of fanfiction, and the rest of the stanza is where I develop it into the finished product of the poem in 10 minutes before submitting to the magazine and going to bed. As usual, I worked on this last minute before submitting because I had no idea what to do with the theme. They actually provided prompts, which I incorporated at the end (peach-stained hands), but at that time, I didn’t have anything on my brain to work with.

My writer’s block self decided to scroll down my Google Docs until, out of nowhere, I remembered writing a fanfiction in High School that could potentially work as a poem. That’s how “familiar gaze” was born (the poem, not the fanfiction).