4:23 AM

Cold detergent smiles. Laced with bleach. And additives. Washing away the meat. Leaving behind only the skeletons. Shadow after shadow promising someone in that empty parking space. Some reason for the trenches between the slats in the blinds. As the ceiling shudders against every exhale of the night.

I would've composed something last night except the paper was all I had. Paper and beer and tamazapam in ugly doses as technology disinherited its only child.

We wait.

For what?

We don't know, but still we wait because the waiting convinces us that it knows.

I tried to write with pen. With paper. With beer and tamazapam. Waiting on the high like a teenager at graduation. Drowning in the throes of tradition abused. Underneath the gown, that's where I want to look. The zipper at the back of their necks. That what I want to pull.

No speeches. No choreographed tosses.

Just the future they never warned us about. And the package it's left us.

In cardboard boxes that don't seem even close to big enough.

4:23am still nothing.

Hours measured in years. I taste you and don't know if I'm only remembering. Or that I ever knew.

How near you were. Or right it might've been given other circumstnaces. In the end we are nothing more than choices to one anohter. Yes's and No's. What does not or will later matter most.

My choice was an easy one, but yours, I don't think I could make it. So many reaons for you to love what you already have. So many reasons for you to love what you don't.

Isn't it over when we admit that we love each other. And there's nothing we can do but let go.

Finding the dark like a second skin. Digging up the tears like another pair of wings.

I understand if you don't want to see.