In the style of Aaron Weiss
Oh, never have I found an out for the likes of us.
We ride to the end of the line on a Greyhound bus.
Our hearts punch in cluttered synchronicity.
Hoping for a little chivalry when I get to the city.
And maybe my self-mutilated mind will cut a break
to a girl who’s fallen on hard times.
Missing home, vestiges of pine fading.
Wanna’ lean into oncoming traffic—
wait nevermind. I’m fine.
Totally fine.
Never have I found an in for the likes of us.
Shut out from life, pariahs, anomalies we were.
When the planes came and things changed,
raining fire from above,
it was just the signal to future vigils;
a little smoke to suffocate our love.
A silver scream severed my thoughts,
when silverscreen tableaus of disaster
did manifest.
You looked to the sky with a coin in your teeth.
And a drag in your eyes that could never find rest.
And we couldn’t tell from afar if it was a bird
or a plane. And what fell was either a bomb or,
well...
Recalling those days at the fair where we met,
laughter hanging gently in the air.
Surrounded, complicitly stranded in your care.
Oh, never have I found a clear road for the likes of us.
We’ve taken to paving our own ways.
The chore of dragging our murky hearts falls on us,
lest we lose footing in these strange days.
And we stood at the top of the Ferris Wheel,
looking down on the shapes filing in below.
I looked in your eyes for the very first time,
and unbeknownst to us it began to
snow.
And on the morning of our wedding day,
with undue pride in my voice I rasply declared
“I am a woman of many strong convictions.”
And you retorted.
“I’ve seen your rap sheet. I know.”
Ambivalence my crutch, the sky stood
on my shoulders and grew heavier
each day.
Words like a band of thieves who
cleared out the orchard and fixed our
fence along the way.
Our lives such a spectrum of gray
(or so I thought).
Oh, never have I seen you
shiver that way
as you did the moment before your death.
Puzzle pieces of wall hung to shield us
from nature’s fiery breath.
And as the embers floated away with you,
passengers into the sky,
my screams crumbled to whimpers inside me.
Choked by powder, I couldn’t cry.
And now the rubble is a memory
as I stand at the precipice of this nexus bright.
Ephemera stirs off me with the wind.
The city beckons with artificial light.
And I have nothing to amend this fresh start
but the clothes on my back and
remnants of you in my heart.
And this burnt-out match I once used to keep warm...
Extinguished by a rainstorm.
Recalling by its fiery amb’r brush
your arms,
the pieces of our stolen youth,
the times we
laughed and hawed with nothing
much to prove.
We’d been playing with matches long before the busy sky
fractured our fantasy and drowned us in ‘real’.
In memorium of your burnt body splayed,
I will rein in this fear and try my hardest to heal.
I will make a life for myself.
My past won’t hold me down.
I will take this used match of mine
and burn these nightmares to the ground.