What do you say to me?
you asked me on night by telephone,
when I call you you crying,
how do you calm me down?

I tell you that I love you,
I replied from atop my car hood
behind No Fun House,
and that things will get better.

You always kept that sugar
in the back of your throat,
and it fooled folks in to thinking
that you felt better than great

Four years is a decent stretch
for two friends to fail to connect
but I guess it makes good sense
that we failed the way we did

When you called me at 1am
three winters ago, I wish I would
have spent more time telling you
that I love you like I always had

When you called me at 1am
three winters ago, I wish I would
have taken just a moment to say
that things were going to be OK.

I guess I would have been a liar
but I love you still – it’s still easy to love
And I’m sorry things never got better
Even though I always said they would

You are riding
on the top level
of a two-story bus
traveling late at night
somewhere
in South America

You are sick
to your stomach
at 4am and
through the wonders
of modern technology
I know

I wish that you
were cured
of whatever it is
making you feel awful
on a Tuesday morning
in Peru

I wish that you
were cured
of all the other
bad things,
too

I descend the steps from my front porch
into the softest of cold rains,
My only protection from the elements
a thinning button-down,
worn-out cowboy hat,
ruined pair of sneakers
– Foundry and Boot Hill and New Balance.

I am not concerned with time or
temperatures or saturation points.
The moon and stars are hidden but
I am sure that they persist.
A car speeds by every so often,
reminding of my frailties
in comparison to their metal might

Lightning whites the sky now
and now, threatening thunder
that never comes. For instants it
is as if the world is blackness
floating in a nothing more profound
than the depths of space could ever be

Two days ago the air was hardly
warm enough to breathe. Now
it whispers with impatience as it
chastises falling specks of chill wet.
If I glance past the street lamps just right,
the road looks like it’s dancing.

By three AM the skeletons shuffling
have left us with our ghosts
out in the chill night air
to stretch our legs, and make merry
our spirits, until we settle
at a point, and set
electric alarms to remind us
what we owe
the next short morning

It is in this space
that I think that I will find you,
writing your own lullabies
and sorting your own mail
and looking for something, too,
among these retching ghosts
and sleeping, lying corpses

I thought I found you once, but
it was just a trick of the eyes

I’ve thought about you on and off since February
sometimes in broad daylight on short walks
other times in the calm dark shadow of a ceiling fan

Once I hoped we would be good friends forever
regardless of how the hammer fell and the shoes dropped
I hoped we’d be on speaking terms, at least
Perhaps that I’d keep your photo in my phone’s directory.

I don’t hope for anything to do with you these days;
not to speak to you, not to catch your smile,
not to get your regards from a friend of a friend

I think my only hope, these days
is that you don’t think of me
at all

It was August of ’15
and all the colors and sounds
were perfectly in season
with the heat just so,
though the humidity was
lower than it often was

I remember riding an empty bed
clutching a pillow imagining
all of the ways a man could
betray his brother

A shoe dropped 210 days later
and in a moment I thought I knew
at least a few of those ways
as plain as if they’d
come to lay on me

But now, in august of ’16
I am left sitting on the porch
of my old-fashioned city home
and I am forced to wonder;
if a man could betray his brother,
were they truly brothers at all?

Now you’re just another fool
milling about a small town
in Rustbelt America
with your racist inclinations
and your lack of ability
to actually care about
anything

There may be comfort
beneath this shingled
roof of ours,
but there is peace
out in that rainstorm

And just how long does family persist
when the blood goes bad, anyway?

If I ever kill you
I want you to know
that I don’t mean
anything by it
and if it causes you
any sort of pain
or your family
any sort of anguish
I’m sorry
and I’ll try to make it
right