Your
thoughts and hopes
impressed elsewhere.

I didn’t mind.
Or at least pretended long enough to believe
I didn’t
Which also failed to impress—
my fortitude or lack thereof—
adding to your exasperation.

Odd how—
now it’s true—
I, un-minding and disinterested,
Am, of a sudden, the center
of your smile.

And since it is true
my smile back
is genuine.
It says—

Don’t hold your breath.

“Please, take what I have.
Everything.”

You are unimpressed and suddenly

I am tired.

You are unimpressed and I
am tired.

You say, at least it’s not broken
these heavy parking lots to nowhere
uncracked, viable, and ever so—

Useful
a saved world of grimy spaces
for people who never show

roads were hard to choose,
everything so made of concrete,
hard to breathe, so difficult to read.

Of course, of course:

people were so quick to declaim
against, hard to see, so inflexible,
everyone is too quick.

That was the past:

you admit it, shoulders and mouth
tense, and I will add, turning away,
what is the present.

What is … :
oh, I am so quick.

integrity
hope
and
(always and)
a sense of you

float the space
between before
and begun–
a risk
worth making

It could have been the songs.
The way you drove your car.
When I laughed into my mittens.
Just the stars in a winter night.

I wish I could say it was the
stars.

And yet I am half sure it was the
darkness – the unknown that stood
before and after the moment.

There we were: snow, snow, and us
in the dangerous part of town, the
way I wanted to lean in and say,

“Here we are.”

But I wasn’t sure enough whether
it was the songs, or just Christmas,
so I closed my eyes instead.

(just past midnight, if you’ve forgotten)

I couldn’t breathe to look at you

(which might’ve been because 
I lost my inhaler in someone’s car-
but maybe not)

Instead I closed my eyes

(to stave off the asthma I’m sure)

Turned my head 
And waited

(if you could call it waiting,
the three beats it took you to cross the room)

For your breath to slide in my ear 
And down my neck

(you never could keep your head still)

With a whispered, “I’m sorry”

(if there’s a phrase to change the world,
it’s not that)

And I shrugged as someone began the count down

(as if we had Times Square
instead of handfuls of confetti)

Which reached zero before you asked

(lips harmlessly hovering near my hair)

“You sure you’re ok?”

(as if it made a difference one way or the other)

But I didn’t bother to reply
I was past midnight, 
And you?
Just my darkness before dawn     

But there I was in a foreign state
Where, and you’ll find this strange,
They don’t believe in Daylight Savings.
(We love to save the light, oh we love it.)

Anyway. I was past midnight on a
Stretch of highway — I couldn’t even
See where I was going, couldn’t see
For the stars, for the night.

But, and maybe you won’t believe, but
I did close my eyes, I whispered,

“I lose seconds,
Thoughts,
Heartbeats,”

And I’m sure you could hear.

I want
(not mobility,
not convenience, but)
to wind my fingers
through the loops of a cord–

Get them so immersed in the coils
I lose seconds
thoughts
heartbeats
in twisting them free

Instead
I spend the time imagining
your own slim phone–
buzzing like mad on a table
in an empty room, or
in your hand–
the screen blinking up
into unresponsive eyes

When you say no no no
that I am wrong
I know you don’t know
enough to know

Even now even now
when you say I am an island
how do you know?
you don’t know my name

When you say you understand
you’re the keeper of me
how do you know?
you do know I love you

But that I’m afraid
is that what you know?
I should prove it
do I prove I’m scared?

I know you’re waiting
don’t I know it
but you wouldn’t know enough
to answer the phone