Oh, these tangled lyrics that float off you skin,

holding my mouth open to the summer light, honey drip breeze

down my chin.

We were almost strangers lying there

so warm. So much is different

in the close corner of your room,

my impossibilities flourish.

There's so much in this speck of dust

you have to wonder if there is

a little more to me and a little more to you

that is shared by the stars and the dirt in my shoes

that makes these little hurts

more of an acceptable incidence

rather than a stain I can't ever get out.

Find a theme and stick to it.

Otherwise You will always wander, carrying a reaching black pitted thing sticking to your ribs and scratching up your organs trying to get out. It will whisper and scribble out your eyes from the inside, hold its hand over your mouth while you scream and kick, but you can't shake it off.

It is this. Visceral and real, hunching your shoulders and sharpening your spine, you will find it hasn't left you even when everyone else has. It will hold your hand at night, stroking your hair and dripping ink so you don't forget this feeling.

Forgive it if there's a slight stinging, that's inevitable when one's treading on the brain. You didn't think you could take feeling like all this in conjunction with one's absence, so it dipped your mind in dust and shoved it in the corner, forgot to mention it. Stings will be aches now, then only a far off throb. It hopes you will work past this, and stop falling into its arms. It brings matches and lights up that smile and convinces those of us still left you're still all there, when you don't have the energy left to.

And even mountains come crashing down.

We will forget today and what we said

and the tilt of the grimace

which you pulled off your face

when you saw I was looking.

I can rewind my VHS tapes and watch them again

and recall what parts made you say what things

and how your hands fluttered up in frustration

when you couldn't hit that note

or think of the phrase

or remember to ask how your parents had been.

I asked, they're fine.

The times of we, they have been dissected

and pulled apart to pieces of pasta

digested and spit back out.

I feel like we're still speaking

over that dinner in the summer

or was it the spring

where you had on a funny color

and I was wearing socks.

I never wear socks.

You loved that orange cup

and I kept picking up pieces of lint from the bathroom floor.

I don't think those leaves were ever so green again.

I'm writing this song I said I would

I think I showed you one time

but you didn't know so much

back then.

We did this thing where you'd find something to think on

and maybe you remember, maybe you don't

I'd think with you, like it was osmosis of the minds

and you'd hand me a rubber band

and I'd show you the right keys to press

and we made lots of food

to eat, and think over

how much we loved how easy this was.

You told me, on the street, when my nails were blue,

in one manner or the next

that it had been slow shades of goodbye

peeling back and back and further yet,

down to the very quick, since we had met at first,

when I was on the lawn,

and my nails weren't actually painted at all.

We knew, I knew.

It was to wreck this pretty picture

that we made it in the first place.

There was the once, when your window got broken.

Sorry about that.

Well, you busted up my sidewalk anyways

and I spilled something on your shoes,

so I guess it evens out.

I'll leave you back there,

from when I knew you

and not as the cold stranger

who really I could call

but honestly could I?

When a mountain falls, it meant to.

it wants to stay down and sleep

too tired too sad to be a bright spot

for us to look at

and wonder about how it went from that to this.

You'll stay back there. I like you there.