Echo

I saw your face this morning –
something I needed,
outside of it all.

I reached out,
years too late to feel your skin,
and felt the echoes of your spirit.

These days,
it is the shadows
and empty spaces
that push me forward –
not quite
a ride or a dance or a dream…
just
the last little ticks of nightmare…

falling away.

But here you are,
nestled in blue…

in the surf and the sky
and the morning…
and all of those things I can’t do.

Here you are,
filling
this crater of heartbeats
with the echo of yesterday’s screams:

“I’m getting better!”

The one damn thing you needed.
The one thing I did, too.

So did the world that forgot you were there…

showing it something,
everywhere.

Sometimes, I’m lost here,
just like you,
slicing the world
with a hot steel blade:

“I’m getting better!”

(from this, from them, from you)

Trying
to shove a kinder,
less merciless truth
into indifferent ears:

“I’m getting better!”

(from this, from them, from stuff you say… stuff you do)

The only scream
I have left –
and sometimes,
the only scream nobody hears anymore.

A ghost scream,
throwing out my numbers and my codes,

filling
the crater of my heart
with precious bursts of echo,

like that smile:

always the gentlest
of explosions,
your smiles.

Starbursts
in the bear pit…
tiny factories of bonfire,
sat on the edge by darkness
and
blossoming
somewhere between…

I saw you sadder than before.
You saw me deeper in there too.

You hold some part of me
that’s still far better in your hands,
haunting
all those happy endings
that came scavenging
in your wake.

The truth is,
I’m more at home in darkness now,
whittling your echoes into kindling
and lighting our bonfires
with their own kind of peace…

riding out your faces and your loves

and showing the world
and the lights out of town

just what they say about me.