i remember, sometimes,
the exact angle of the painting
hung crooked on the wall
while i turned a red lego over
in my seven-year-old hands;
her hands- a girl i don't
even know anymore, another
life i'd lived before i
learned that souls were breakable,
before i
knew i was broken without
having watched myself break. now
i'm taking up to five showers a day and
there's gotta be a reason
those men with beards give me
an ache in the pit of my stomach.
but i don't want to blame you,
no i don't want to credit you for my strength...
and
you know how the seasons all
have their own scent, and
sometimes it's winter in the middle
of summer? well,
sometimes i feel your breath on my skin,
but i turn over in bed, i can
chase your ghost away now, but
sometimes i pass you 100 times a day
on the same street in the same 30 seconds,
no i don't think you're in this city
anymore, where the winter days
seem to outnumber the rest...
Dear man,
would you recognize this slightly older face
or did you never even look there in the first place?
have you read my name
in newspaper lines
each of these times-
or is your new life large enough
to barricade this out? see i tried
to block you out, to take myself out,
i tried learning that i
can't change
what you did... So tell me,
did life ever take you
beyond the barrel of the gun you held to your head
that night
you
knew that you'd be better off dead? tell me,
how is Laura? & how's your fucking mom?
I pass her house on my way to work now, &
there's the son gone wrong, the case of
ignoring the very pit of fire that has made me
the phoenix able to rise...
and just up the street is that house i drive by so slowly,
this is where my moment of silence is due-
for a girl I've seen in photographs
& written a decade-long epitaph for.
I never really knew her because mirrors can lie,
but some nights I do
remember the angle of the painting
that hung crooked on the wall.

(2003)