more free writes
I’ve been feigning fine for weeks now, but following someone else’s brake lights down the highway brought it all to light. They burned brightly, like the pain in my chest, and I thought that if I could look down, I was probably glowing the same red, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of the that truck in front of me that was not your truck and wouldn’t be no matter how hard I cried.
Sitting at the table in a field of ashtrays and cigarette butts, I write out of order in these notebooks-pages between poems, scattered second hand thoughts, words which I claim but came from somewhere else, al though I can’t put my finger on the place. Not like I used to put my fingers on you. My hands through your hair, my lips on your skin. I know how you taste at different times of the day; I’ve charted the constellations of your freckles. I know how the rthym of your walk changes with your mood, memorized your pulse, the corners of your body more familiar to me than even my own. You always touched me like gospel, but since that day, since the conversation in my car, in the rain, I cannot remember your voice. I clung to the beer can in my left hand because I could not cling to you and tried desperately to record everything, but I have lost the cadence of your speech, the nuances of your inflections. A voice I’ve heard for six years and I cannot find it anywhere.