Mal Means "Bad" (in the Latin)

How heavy, thine heart?
I’ll weigh it on a grey scale
and then I guess we’ll talk.
Do you recall the time you told me,
“Mal means ‘bad’ in Latin?”

I still speak in tongues and lips and fingertips,
and I keep stuttering semantics, and I always
let you fall for it, making meaning out
of every fated kiss; and I hoped that it
would never come to this

but it always does its part
I’ll weigh it on a grey scale
and then I guess we’ll talk.
Do you recall the time you told me,
“Mal means ‘bad’ in Latin?”

As always, art is open
to the interpretation
of the patron, and while I may
have lost you in translation,
I was found sleeping soundly
in a sea of constellations where
I drowned beneath the comfortable
blankets of abyss, its never-ending
nothingness reminding me
of all that I had missed.

Though I’m hardly a scientist, it seems
to be my density, and not my mass,
that helps me stay afloat; I guess that I’ve
been lying to myself all along. My heart
has only half the hallowed substance of
the ocean that it swallows (albeit eloquently),
but like drinking too much water, you
can drown your cells and suffocate yourself
until you choke; if that’s a metaphor,

I meant it for my heart
I’ll weigh it on a grey scale
and then I guess we’ll talk.
Do you recall the time you told me,
“Mal means ‘bad’ in Latin?”

My betrayal knows no tragedy, and so
my greatest stories have all spilled
from my own pen, and my authenticity
is never called to question, like the
greatest of the dead white men; it seems
I will not go down in history as the
soft romantic man that I believe myself
to be. Instead, I leave my Juliets for
dead and carry on, never stopping
long enough to wonder if I’m wrong.