internment

It is that stopper loosed from the bottle, the sense that just once this revel should end. It is the press of ink and the scrape of paper, the pen losing it's art in the words. Blown kisses and swept ashes, that flavor of loss chilled over ice, green glass and white white teeth. A few years adrift and a lifetime of pictures. So few years left this side of the rainbow. The party long ago finished, now everything left the picking up.

It is how the shelves surround, dusty and cluttered with paperbacks and tricks. The same song playing with a wink and a twang. Not a mean spirit or a pure heart for a thousand miles. Not a word left loose or a fist let fly. These remnants and alibis, love letters set adrift, reasons run to the ground. I lean into these glib whispers, wandering through your words.

I said it then because no-one was listening. I say it now for some more of the same. The way you wasted all that paper. The way you mistook every smudge and line. The pages crumpled, for grip and measure. The pages lost, the writing a scrawl on a stone. Midnight somehow always about to arrive or just gone. Poems meant for nations of lost names. I say it now because the empty can only grow.