This Is A Fire Door, Never Leave Open
Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room.
Half illuminate a face before they disappear.
You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling.
I breathe out smoke against the window, trace the letters in your name.
Our letters sound the same;
full of all our changing that isn't change at all.
All straight lines circle sometime.
You said "Somewhere there's a box full of replacement parts
to all the tenderness we've broken or let rust away.
Somewhere sympathy is more than just a way of leaving.
Somewhere someone says 'I'm sorry.'
Someone's making plans to stay."
So tell me it's okay.
Tell me anything, or show me there's a pull,
unassailable, that will lead you there,
from the dark, alone, to benevolence that you've never known,
or you knew when you were four and can't remember.
Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams,
and the silence knows what you silence means,
and your metaphors (as mixed as you can make them)
are linked, like days, together.
I still hear trains at night, when the wind is right.
I remember everything, lick
and thread this string that will never mend you
or tailor more than a memory of a kitchen floor,
or the fire-door that we kept propping open.
And I love this place; the enormous sky,
and the faces, hands that I'm haunted by,
so why can't I forgive these buildings,
these frameworks labeled "Home"?