The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good news is:

My demands on stars, eyelashes and wishbones
Have been put to better use
Causes that actually stand a chance
Like, childhood prank wars revisited in adulthood
Or a speed boat made of ice cream


See, I awoke the other morning to find
That somehow in my sleep
I had opened the door to your cage
And you had flown out my bedroom window
Into the night
And onto
Whomever.
And I have never slept better.

Your name can now be found
Embedded in a grocery list of tasks
And call-backs
And pencil-ins
Instead of a flashing neon sign
On the tip of my tong
Or just in front of my always-shut eye-lids
Replacing rest
With restlessness
Robbing me of deep breaths…
And it can't be safe to have that much neon that close to your face for so long

Oh! And I got my truth back
I thought she had become so tired
Of living in the shadow
Of your presence
That she had evaporated into the clouds
To be carried off and dropped as rain
In Timbuktu or Kalamazoo
Or some other poetically over used place
Where she could get sunlight on her face
And earth between her toes
But I was wrong;
She was still waiting in the corner where I left her
Covered in dust but still beautiful.
And a little taller.

The Bad news is:
When we cared,
Communication was strained
We wringed dribblings of conversations
From ether-soaked rags
Shaped like lungs,
Threw curve-ball pleasantries
Around the lumps in our throats.
Words were pushed out of mouths
Like creeks from floorboards
Found in houses that sag with the weight
Of knowing better-
Each one loaded with
A technicolor epic
Of lemonade and train tracks and
Gentle. Men.
And sunsets slower than gimpy snails.

And we couldn’t share any of it.

The irreconcilable differences
In how we speak
Seeped into the groundwater
That nourished “us”.
Our roots desperately sucked every toxic particle
Until they drew their last drop.

Leaves began to turn
And fall as flies
Finding the ground
Like they were finally coming home.
Bare branches scratched the sky
As if the sun rays were escape routes
And as the sun set on this scene
It dawned on me:

You never fail to disappoint me.

The thought exploded my body into skyward bound microscopic pieces
Each one absorbed by a cloud

This time of year,
The weather
Is perfect
In Kalamazoo.