Tuesday 7/04/2006 10:40:00 PM

Turning over in your jeans. Thought to your connection thwarted. An alchemist's smirk spilling from the veins of an optimist. It's not where we're taken. It's where we never went. Squeaking swings abandoned on the playground where the possibility first kicked. I hear the laughter in your sadness. See the gratitude in your goodbye. Tortoises without their shells dressed in the hare's clothes again.

If I were newer. If I could keep that star from moving away. If I only had your naivete. Your faith in the struggle. Could see myself in its rearview. And know that I was the one chasing it.

I always knew you were an answer. I just never knew which question you belonged to. You were colors. So many of them thundering like fireworks through the darkness. So impossibly alive, but only for a moment.

And then gone. Lost to the same fire that gave them life.

You were. Are. The dream I always wake up in the middle of.

Thoughtless tomorrow on my doorstep as yesterday bends down to tie its shoe.

I go, but not because I wanted to leave. I go because I don't belong here.

Some stairs take you up. Others only take you down.

And you've always known where I was going. With or without you.

I can't tell you I'm all right. So I don't say anything at all. I can't tell you how I feel. So I leave these messages. Drunk cocoons stumbling for their butterflies.

And nothing I try seems willing to change me for more than a little while.

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