Just for now
Won’t you let me walk
Hand in hand
With you, we, us
By a bloated river
Through mud puddles
And leaves
And life

On a silent stage
In an empty room
I dream of standing
Before a roaring crowd
But for now
The silent ghosts
In the seats
Will do

They don’t make cards for us
Pre-made poems with cartoon animals
Telling jokes that aren’t actually funny
But we still laugh, because, yeah, that’s just like us

Candy hearts never say ‘we love you’
Or ‘I love you both’ or ‘be ours’
Matching rings aren’t sold in threes
Puzzle-heart necklaces are split down the middle
For him and her and
What about me?

Ours is not a Hallmark love
With two hands clasped and fingers meshing
But we still walk together
Hand in hand in hand
And I hold hers behind your back
And we lie together
Like a row of knocked over dominoes
Three people no longer bothered
By the strange stares and confused glances
Because what we have is better than that

So who cares if they don’t make cards for us
I’ll make one myself
With a puzzle heart on the front
Broken into three
Drawn in three strange colors
That people wouldn’t normally put together
But that, when combined, become something beautiful
And I’ll laugh, because, yeah, that’s just like us.

I had broken my promise
“I’ll write you every week.”
It’s been 3 years since every week
Became every other
Then every month
Then never.

When I saw a horse
With a brown coat
Speckled white
Like the one on your jacket
I knew never had to end.

So I wrote.
I wrote about everything
And about nothing
And all that came between.
I wrote about insignificant things
Things you wouldn’t remember
Things I can’t forget.

I wrote about our past
My present
And what might be in our future

I didn’t know you no longer had one.

I didn’t know that you were already gone
That life had been too much
And you mind had become a war zone
With every thought falling,
Dying one after the other
As though to some macabre rhythm.
I didn’t know you had stopped watching horses
In favor of watching trains.

I wonder if you were as beautiful
As you stood on the tracks
Arms thrown wide
As you were when I first saw you riding.

And now, as I look back
Over the year since I learned
Since I wrote
And I can’t help but wonder.
Would anything be different
If never hadn’t lasted quite so long?

I write myself
My voice, my thoughts
Undisguised
Unplanned
Imperfect
But real, oh so real
True to my heart
To my thoughts, to my soul
True to me and to my world

Yes, my world
As it is my world
As much as yours
And as much as theirs
And the man on the corner
And the old woman lying
Dying, ending
Not her world anymore

But still ours, yes
Still mine
And I will speak and write of it
For the world to hear
To read, to see and to understand
If they can understand
Can they?

Not always, no
And what they do not understand
They protest, rebel, refuse
Try to quiet me, silence me
Steal my voice and call me crazy
Am I crazy?

Perhaps
But crazy comes and goes
like the light of the sun
And though crazy, I am still true
Still here, alive and real
And I will not be silenced
Render me mute
and I shall write instead
Take my pen
And I shall ***** my fingers
And write in blood
My blood
My soul
The purest way to write, I believe,
Of this world
This unplanned, uncensored world
As it is
And it is yours and mine
And always has been, always shall be
For it can not be anything else
Lest it cease to exist at all.