I could make way for your better angels. I could clear off a place on the shelf. I could cheer the stars as they slip into the sky unnoticed, watching as their sparkle tries to usurp the moon as it takes its time in the tomb. We never know how hard it’s going to hit. We never know what’s on its way. All stones and sticks and Ignatz bricks, the words turn hard and the wishes go broke, letters sent to win some bet and the love left behind just goodbyes and alibis. All the story holes and set pieces taking meaning with them as they go.
The shadows reach east as the sun skips town, the breeze and the heat doing their old routine, doves strutting in the dirt. Flies land and light. Tension holds the blue in the sky and the sun to the leaf. The stippled jewels shimmer in the swaying tree shadows and in spaces swept by limbs in the wind. The spent shells of daylight clattering in the gutter as the day gets its money’s worth, the old songs rising up beside me, resurrecting past loves and old ghosts. Sad smiles and small reminders that it’s all on me. I mistook you for someone else. My heart is that kind of foolish, hard to win but easy to hurt. Just another stone done with skipping. Another poem that no one gets.
You’re there most nights and every day. In the shade of the forest and the bright of the bloom. You meet my mind in the mission of the moon and the spark of every movie kiss, your scent on my pillow, your flavor on my lips. Time moves through me, unimpressed with the stillness I am steeped in, beating down bone and flesh like the ocean beats the shore. An old man getting older, I pick and choose through old moments and foolish mistakes, the dashed hopes and haunted places making sorry bouquets I clutch and cling to long after the flowers are dead. The latest and likely last, you’d ring out even if you weren’t you. But you are you, and I’m only me. You always the wings of crows and the moon above, me a stone sinking in the sea.