Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room.

Half illuminate a face before they disappear.

You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling.

I breathe out smoke against the window, trace the letters in your name.

Our letters sound the same;

full of all our changing that isn't change at all.

All straight lines circle sometime.

You said "Somewhere there's a box full of replacement parts

to all the tenderness we've broken or let rust away.

Somewhere sympathy is more than just a way of leaving.

Somewhere someone says 'I'm sorry.'

Someone's making plans to stay."

So tell me it's okay.

Tell me anything, or show me there's a pull,

unassailable, that will lead you there,

from the dark, alone, benevolence that you've never known,

or you knew when you were four and can't remember.

Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams,

and the silence knows what you silence means,

and your metaphors (as mixed as you can make them)

are linked, like days, together.

I still hear trains at night, when the wind is right.

I remember everything, lick

and thread this string that will never mend you

or tailor more than a memory of a kitchen floor,

or the fire-door that we kept propping open.

And I love this place; the enormous sky,

and the faces, hands that I'm haunted by,

so why can't I forgive these buildings,

these frameworks labeled "Home"?






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