A Broken Record Playing to an Empty Room
It’s when I’m alone
in my own apartment, my own bed that
I think about her most and I’m alone
in my own apartment, my own bed a lot recently. Too much.
Leaving for work while darkness
still loiters in the sky,
Occasionally, I glance back into the hallway and
catch a glimpse of her there like a shadow passing
across the walls, a ghost in a photograph.
Does the love we might have had
haunt the empty rooms of her apartment
as it drags itself around the floorboards of mine
leaving behind a bitter scent
that stings the eyes?
When she cleans the dishes in the kitchen sink,
feels the hot water over her hands does the memory of us fucking there ever flash through her mind, a momentary blinding stroke of lightning in the skyline of that deserted city?
The couch too, when she’s sat there watching tv with the newest one, the one that isn’t anything
like me, does she feel me there too?
Inside her again like a tear in the fabric of the seat,
or a dark stain on the cushions that she can’t scrub out?
When she places the needle down on an old record,
let’s the music we shared crowd the air from that
cheap record player and sways slowly in her bedroom
does she remember that I was the one
who taught
her
how to
really
dance?
Uninhabited
Palsied hands on a door
too white in this
early morning fog.
Empty bottles &
words like shards
of glass.
Wearing the dull
costume of a part never
intended to be played.
Unable to recall
the words said,
though these scars remain.
I Carry
The cemetery inside me.
Too often I visit it to loiter among
the graves, placing my hands
on the too cold stones,
scraping away the moss that’s
grown over the important parts.
Drunkenly I mourn, knowing
things that are dead,
always stay dead.
And maybe
that’s for the best.