poets against the world
remember how one summer you and i took to the road, watching horizons stretch before us like lines out of every untold story, windows down because we couldn't afford a bright red convertible, and how we'd have to shout to be heard over the whip-thin sounds of the wind? remember remember, we'd stop the car in the middle of a desert and sit under the shade of the opened trunk and write for hours, me on my laptop and you with your pen, hunched over a spiral-bound notebook, edges worn away with cheap coffee. what true art has come from a laptop, you scoffed, the true poet lets their soul bleed on paper, finds art in the blotches of ink. remember how i rolled my eyes, remember how i said the true poet conquers the world with the word alone, remember how i read you lines and phrases, lean with little descriptions, all muscle and sinew, remember how remember how you hummed as i spoke, eyes bright with appreciation, nodded helplessly at the technical mastery of alliteration, onomatopoeia, at the meter and rhyme, at my voice rolling like waves. but you wouldn't remember how your stanzas, weighed down with excess words, punctuation like sturdy necklaces looped around fat necks, punched past my defences and left me breathless with want. you wouldn't remember how i wrote every poem for you that summer, saved file after file of a word, a sentence, of your ink-speckled hands on the driving wheel and your smile against the sunset and the breathless romanticism of it all.
remember how one night we attended a poetry slam, took a table near the back and ordered cheap beer after beer, choking on the wafting cigarette smoke from other tables and stealing each other's yam fries, and how we rubbed grease and ink smudges onto napkins as we jotted down lyrics and quotes and the littlest seeds of a poem? remember how our palms ached from all the applause, remember how remember when you just clenched your hands into fists as someone read your father's favorite, emerson's give all to love, the one you read until your voice collapsed into whispers as he breathed quietly in the hospital bed and remember how you leaned over when it was over, as i was clapping, and whispered, dirty-deep, give all to love, the wildest, / the quietest of beasts. remember how i dared you then, biting back tears and grinning into your shoulder, to go up there and read, a proper send-off to a proper poet, and how you cleared your throat against the pulsing sorrow and stood up, swaying against the six bottles of budweiser. but you wouldn't remember how i cataloged each break of your voice each hitch of your breath the every cadence of every stanza. you wouldn't remember how i fell captive to your conquering verse, how my shoulders bent against the howling force of your words, how my breath shuddered and my eyes shuttered shut against the breathless ache of it all.