Youth and By Ourselves

Consider this and that

It wasn’t meant to be

The thing that is going to

Kill me is already on the inside.

There’s this small grandfather clock

Inside us all-

There are minutes of death.

Just the touch. Just this brief.

Where love slips away with the fare

But who’d ask for it back?

There was a time

I knew you though-

Hands, face, pendulum

And when we finally caught up with history

We were no less crueler than our parents.

Yet we were relentless, forgiving, unconditional

We were direction…in blue…on a road sign

Found everywhere…then suddenly…all at once…

Father. He misses mother and she’s been dead

For 24 years

I haven’t missed you that much and you are

so gone

Then I stepped away from the poem

Mid stanza…

We must have been sexton’s sad pencils to say

Those things back then.

But there are rooms for us now and anniversaries to

Commemorate,

In the perfect city someone has left everything

Including themselves. You. You should

Make sure you date and pen down

All the soft things that we said.

Because everyone will ask when it was,

How it happened- say something about it.

How the night rain spilled all over.

Our lives. Our soft soft and honest lives.