POEM - The Hook of Nowhere

I wanted to leave you a playlist behind

when I passed on;

its working title was nothing more

than the words ‘dead lover’

And, the deeper I dug myself into those

dark places beneath the blare,

the more I felt you were already listening

Toward the end, I even believed that you

might come to my rescue

 

With only a full day left before

our now-meaningless anniversary,

I purposely dulled my other senses

Nothing but the music fed me there in the dark

A mere 87 minutes is what our

retrospective amounted to,

and, hour after hour, I let myself imagine

how it might feel to go back in time;

to live us all over again

 

I wondered if, in this process of condensing

the length of our intertwined travels,

I’d somehow forgotten a magical moment or two

Perhaps you’d recollect, and ponder over

the broken impossibility of such an absence

 

Wholly unaware of the time, I fell asleep

in that repetition of tears I’d tired of living,

but the pieces never stopped performing

I dreamt of your sensual piano playing,

and awoke to Chopin’s ‘Ocean’ emptying

as though predicting the coming finality

of my ears being able to hear it

 

A few quick nicks amid the noise,

then the world started to fade

And, only as I began to disappear

did the grotesque chorus of truth

come screeching into my head

like broken glass in a car crash:

There’s so much that would be new to me

which I’ll never get to hear,

and you aren’t even interested in listening

to all that’s going to be left of me