is to sit in coffee shops with strangers who feel like home, every one of us a vessel for croissants and coffee we don’t taste. We sunbathe and drink behind windows and wonder why we’re still so pale. Meanwhile the sun continues to give life to the land and anyone who sees that the exit is the entrance, that coffee was meant to be enjoyed in colder hands.
On the day you fell the life you lived the future you wanted came down from the clouds to taste the cold Earth. The strong column of bone that carried your spirit was crushed not by the fishing boats you once sailed in the West not by the numerous hours you spent hunched over printing photos in the dark for acclaimed men of New York City but by mere coincidence a misplaced foot perhaps in a life that couldn’t keep up with you. Still that didn’t stop you from peeking over the fence and startling me with your big glasses and bigger hello one early morning. You bent over and gathered some sprigs of lavender from your lovely garden. A housewarming gift you said for the new kid on the block. Then there were the eggs I wanted but couldn’t eat, freshly laid by your loved hens. Their happiness was a familiar sound in the quiet dawn that housed our street. I heard yours too in the way you talked to them as if they were sacred, royalty. “They only eat organic.” Even the wildflowers listened. You always asked them to come home with you (“if they wanted to” of course) and they responded always with glee. They knew what care and joy felt like. Rising from my own fall after all these years now I know it too.
There is always the trace of you in these places we once called ours. I’m here again today and now they’re only mine and yours.
I come from time to time just to see if things have changed. Not much has though there’s a new couch now.
And there is still that familiar knot in the butter of this biscuit as savory as our kisses were.
My coffee is still dark like the blades of your eyes, your rooibos tea now a touch lighter than mine.
count the possibilities on your toes this time, as if they were suddenly released from the grip of boots too small for feet meant to kiss the earth. Walk until your feet need rest and rest. Worry for awhile and let the sand remind you of rocks and change. Then go and find yourself on the other side of the shore where love always fits in places it once couldn’t.
You’re a painting You’re a body of photographs framed in a movie reel –
You’re music You’re a guitar that sings on love-stained strings –
You’re something to behold a rose never to touch a smile just for show –
Does the hunger ever end? even in romance and pretense even in more-than-just–friends –
You’re poetry You’re heaved sonnets to a delicate love song– An Oliver and a Dickinson
in a world that wants Cummings and Nerudas –
Hold on. Forget to have have fun. Rerun every kiss you ever held like tomorrow won’t come.
Watch the sun paint the sky in thankless strokes. Let your mind play roulette with all your hopes. Tell yourself you have to do this alone. Remind yourself you’ll never find yourself and your way back home.
Don’t confess what a mess you are. Count your sins and every scar. Convince yourself you still want what you don’t want and let the Myrtle tree out front shed her pink dress without the lonely eyes of her only witness.
You didn’t text me on my birthday. I know I know, I walked away but you asked if you could even when everything was breaking between us in that burning room and now I’m breaking and thought you would save me, like you always did. But still, perhaps, you knew, like you always did, what my heart needed most, and gave that to me instead. You, the better put-together half, are still saving me, even after all this time.
You miss her. You want to tell her you miss her. You want to say you feel lost and alone, that you feel like you’re the world’s biggest dunce every morning when you wake up empty-handed every empty-handed minute before nightfall. But she’s not what you need right now. You need to confront, with compassion, whatever it is that led you here. You need to let go of the dreams and fantasies and to root yourself in reality. You need to be and to become the one you need. It’s difficult to let go of what you loved, so be patient
I’m eating my last bowl of oatmeal, looking outside the window of a life that was meant for us. It’s perfectly framed:
You in the sunlit kitchen singing dad rock making ciabatta, swaying your small hips to rhythms still foreign to me
and I endlessly pondering how to fit all of it onto evenly spaced lines.
Love was delicious to you. The tomatoes you grew welcomed eating and everything else that needed to be tasted.
I hold the world In a single equation.
Don’t forget to express the bifurcations.
A flap in the wind A sudden change of heart I have accounted for every unknown start.
But what of love and culture and all the -isms too?
It is all certain in the limit of time.
But until then what will you do?