When And You
When I feel
the bass guitar
thrumming long strokes
inside my chest,
swimming backwards
along my spine,
it reminds me
I am alive.
When I allow
the tinny audio
stream from
earbuds hanging
on threads, pinching
the chords just so
that they work,
I am holding my
lifeline
gripped in a fist,
knuckles blanched red as I cradle
carefully the inhuman emotionality.
When, when, when
I steal notes
I croak coarse vowels
while liquid beads the mirror
and in the dark,
I let myself try to cry
and I fail.
Then I press a button
to some channel
playing on the radio
am I, I am
reminded
how cold it was
this time last year,
how you texted me one last time
asked me to be your friend
and couldn't we have been that from the beginning?
When you let me
write you a song
break my guitar over you
and you shouldn't thrum in my chest
and you shouldn't be on my lips
and in my poetry at all
and we were nothing
and I find it hard to remember your name
or the feelings we had
or how it wasn't really you
or how knowing you made me feel a hole
or how that hole existed long before I desperately
or how I texted back OK
or how I wish I had told you it wasn't.
If I hadn't known you, I would never have known what I was missing.