The room erupts, and I'm getting impatient.
I wanna say we played hangman on the
backs of paper placemats.

Spent all day kicking a can around the driveway,
as you peeled an orange. Last week three
friends died on the highway.

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I won't miss
the drip of the IV,
blip of my pulse on a bright screen
in a sterile room,
white-knuckled grip on the bed rail.
Crippling debt and a wet blood trail,
feral and crude.
I trusted no one but you.

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Do you think she ever turned to the bear stars
the way I do
and finally started to feel at all,
the Parthenon in free fall
barely there in the background.

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Why do we wait for each other
like a fool waits for the sun
a better man already
knows will never come?
The summer of our
childhoods have ended.
All our friends became somebody
else's friends, and now I
got a photo of an actor who looks like you. It keeps the
dust off of that corner of my room.

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I etched the letter 'E' into my desk
at the detox on Lakeshore. (Lord made sure)
I'm a fuck-up junkie,
but I'm one lucky horse.
The flakes were only three weeks away,
and there are owls to be saved. (Every day)
I'm scraping by, neither shoe tied,
Windy City shaving ice off your grave (site
since you died).

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So, we moved out to a city
where the buildings scrape the sky
like a nick in your thumbnail
before the polish dries.

You push your cuticles back,
take a cubicle sack lunch
in a brown paper bag,
while I try not to ask for too much.

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Chambray shirt,
knees with dirt.
You're just in from the garden.
The summer squash are done.
I say I always wanted a postbox
with no postcard in
it.

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Maybe love
is a thing you fall into,
not a foolish thing to get talked right out of.
Deep breaths
on the Amtrak to New Orleans
with a backpack and a pack of cigarettes.

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I want to drop everything in order to pick up what matters most. Work will always exist, but people leave or die or change their minds every day. I want to get on a train to New Orleans and tell a person I love that I love them to their face. I want to press send. I want to smoke fewer cigarettes. I want to never stop enjoying the scent of cloves. ( Read more... )

Today is the first day of us.
A VHS tape slogan with the
magnetic strip torn up.
Was it twisted and bent
or just a scratch on the lens?
You list the things
for which we weren't meant.

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