You can’t hide from change
by me
Your eyes flick back at me,
daunting, knowing,
reflecting the question I threw
up into the air.
For you to catch,
for you to throw back,
at me.
For you to throw away.
You have no answers for me,
i know.
No map of the world to spread out,
pin up,
trace with a magic marker.
“Here’s where we’ll go, babe,
and then here,
with your hair pinned back,
my arm wrapped around you.
Slurpees and mars bars,
for the road.
you and me, kid.
just you and me.”
Spread your lies,
spread your paranoia,
spread your legs, sweetheart of the open road.
All for her,
all for him,
all for us,
all for me.
And now you ask me if I’m the one afraid to change,
without opening your mouth,
in that tongue-tied up in knots,
robbed of breathing kind of way.
i lie back and stare at the plastic stars on the ceiling,
fifty to a package,
glow in the dark.
“Hey baby, it’s the Fourth of July.”
even though the calendar says January two.
I wish I could crawl into the song,
sit on your front step,
with a cigarette,
wait for you to come back and say I’m sorry,
I’m so very sorry,
again.
Instead I avoid your gaze,
chip the paint off the wall,
slowly.
I try to think of ten thousand ways to sign my name,
where do I put the curls and loops,
the flair,
the heavier push on the pen,
the ones that leave deep indentations on the page,
my mark.
No, I don’t fear change,
I like the feel of the clinking in my back pocket,
the smile from a stranger,
with a stain on their soul,
ripped hole in the arm of his sweater.
“Can I help you, Ma’am?”
“Hello, my name is…
my name is,
my name is…”
How I long for the re-identity,
a new mask,
new paint on the walls,
that new soul smell.
We live for second-chances,
first days,
ears that haven’t heard my boring old tales a million times over,
and a day,
all my reruns.
Like you, my dear.
Just like you.
Yet I loathe the forgetting that will happen,
the names that will blur in my head,
directions to that little taco stand.
What was it we always ordered?
How the ice machine clamored,
and the headboard broke in two,
the story of how you got that scar.
I’ll miss that.
I will.
And now your eyes are closing,
with a whisper,
as a frozen denial slides in between us.
Can’t you feel it?
It’s here under the bed sheets,
sliding through our fingertips,
tangling the kink in your hair,
turning my breath on the back of your neck to ice.
“I know we’ll never change.”
Fourth of July :: X
at the starlite diner 