When you say it back in reverse
Do you hear your own voice
Or the Devil’s?
Sit down, keep your feet on the ground
Keep your eyes on the clock hung on the wall
Tongue against your teeth
Cold air, it gets dark sooner now
You knew that if we found out
You sat with a cloud above your head
The oak tree outside the window
It bothered you how long the leaves stayed green
Even though we insist
It’s deciduous
You wouldn’t wait for it
To fall down
Honest health bred honest hands
A dull circuit repeating
Just the same your heart was settled
A full subset depleting
Tried to walk down the shore
Tried to swim overhead
But the tide wouldn’t take us anywhere
Tried to close both our eyes
Tried to focus to divert
Our senses so it would sound better this time
When you scream it out
As hard as you can
Do you feel your own chest
Heave beneath you?
An ironed shirt
And I studied all night
It came time to recite
And I couldn’t stand still
We fall down
We suck young blood
Our deceptive cadence
And we raised it well
But we couldn’t name it
And when it finally went to sleep
It just went to sleep
Leaning up against the open door
It’s all empty now, we moved it out
And our reluctance to shut it once more
And leave it shut, and leave it, we left it
And the swollen boards rose up from the floor
And tripped you when you tried to walk away
Stop blaming yourself
It means well, but we can never give it back
We can reach the ladder to climb back down, take it step by step,
Or we can reach the precipice but we don’t know which is the better one
The ache, the toll, the loss, the secret,
The choke, the flinch, the cast, the scar,
The steps, the porch, the flowers, the time bomb,
The sound logic not to, the urges that got through,
The lines in our palms and the lines in our foreheads,
What we let go last time so this time we’d save it,
Resisting motion and holding to slow it
Did we miss the last bus or is one still coming?
I think it’s coming