It Always Comes So Close & Then Disappears

It's all down to you. To every new morning's baby crying.

Down to your blank notebook, all sides opening at once, hands like an ocean of birds.You standing

there looking back at me from behind 

your chosen wall of love's newly made flesh. Your smile like blood on a blade of grass. That's

such a lonely thing to do.You

never fully believed in sending silly

hand puppets to the ancient citizen 

stars like I did, maybe once but not anymore. And I never pretended you're

not really all there all the time. The damage

gets quietly done. We make no

best attempt to break the fragile 

peace into holy wafers. To shatter the cold illusion

that we are only worlds apart, into laughter that flickers on the faces of onlookers.

I hear your earrings for instance 

and I wonder what that might 

feel like in a cave. It's nothing false. That kind

of damned longing takes all of my patience and then some. That kind of hapless wondering around 

for its own simple sake makes me crazy with bottomless grief. That puzzling of a faroff mystery bell calls me to many ancient tears. Sometimes

I think to myself I am

only a mirror you can comb

your hair in. Check your teeth for misapplied lipstick.

What if I came around? Met

you on the other side of this overgrown forest of

glass and sharp-eyed splinters? Would we simply walk away,free at last,

hand in hand, or would you disappear

the moment I stepped into

your personal sunshine? It's a tender trap,

as they say, but the shock is a 

very real looking for some real found light upon only your face.

You paraded by like remembered 

visitors at a shadowy all-night 

zoo. All of you. One by one.The only thing

I see on your stranger faces now

is the hidden lunch schedules in

your shut down heads. Still I tape my poems

to the wind as I run out

of fresh lemonade and sweet dreaming and the ticking 

timebombs that jingle in my pocket. I thought you were my most beautiful

dreaming thing to ever happen. Something's always running

out on our friendship I suppose. Nothing

new here. The sun goes down. And away it goes. Someday

we'll walk alone together again. Private rain flares up and suddenly I'm soaked and spitting out real leaves.