Your Other Left
I’ve been keeping busy
Keeping you at arm's length and breaking ice between the covers
My father was a liar, he taught me everything I know
And as fictional as they come, he’s as memorable as they go

And I dreamt the biggest dreams in all the weeks I couldn’t sleep
Navigate the palms of promise, like the ones I couldn’t keep
Did I fall silent like a glove dropped into banks of greying snow?
Am I forgotten like your wallet, like the songs you used to know?

Now I’m asleep and you’re nostalgic
I’ve got twisted thoughts of murder
Although I’d never lay a hand I dream of simple ways to hurt her
Watch me leave without a note, just your name in every song
But I’m sure she wouldn’t notice until the wind sings through her palms

I’ve been keeping busy
Taking mirrors from bedroom walls
So I can’t recognize the reflection of a past that I’ve been trying hard to shatter
I crushed the distance in my palms
I fought like fencers through the patterns
Of a future as bright as a litho black
Got your degree, so what’s the matter with you?
It can all change so quickly
And I can’t recognize…

So I’ve been running my soles straight to compensate
For my time running in my place
The gerbil wheel spun me ‘round again
It’s left me feeling jader than an august rain

When we wrote our names in the wet cement, I felt walked on
Waiting like a patient book to have my spine split open and to spill my guts into memories
Was my name simply spat on the casket? And no flowers befall on my grave?
We’re just dust to the wind
I’m a dog-eared page of the moment you hummed out my name like a song that we’d sang
Your crescendo wrapped a cloth around my eyes
To find a strength to call my own, I traced your name into this poem
Just keeping busy
Watching loved-ones go by car and tucking good-ones into coffins
It seems so often, we sing out the memories instead of the movements

When I go it will feel like waking up in a well-lit room with no memory of the excuse that I used to use

In the post they lost your letter
I imagine that it read
You were sorry that you’d miss me
Not as sorry had we met
I took the mirror off my bedroom wall
I was growing tired of waking up next to someone I didn’t know