It's beginning
to look
a lot
like
last Christmas

We catch each other's faces
From other ends of the store
We're walking towards eachother
I remember us in grade school
Young
Naive
Giggling about which girl
was the cutest
Like six year old men do
Learning math
And grammar
And art
And other life lessons
Which unconsciously stuck with me
And about friendship
I knew you then
Like a brother
So now here we are
After some years
Running into each other at a grocery store
I wonder why you're in town
I wonder how your life has been
I wonder what happened with your parents
There's so much to catch up on
So much to laugh about
And to cry about
We're pretty close now
I shove into my pockets for my cell phone
You stop and shuffle and look away
You pretend you need to go down a different aisle
I pretend to look at canned soup
As if neither of us noticed
You think I might not remember
You think I don't know your name
And possibly you have forgotten mine
It is better to ignore these things though
For the sake of a small possibility
It could have been uncomfortable
And real

I could
Talk about nature
Or give you my opinion on a subject
I could describe the
Unmistakable beauty
Of everything that is and ever was
Before us
I could touch your heart
With the tip of my pen
I could arrange words from my
Internal thesaurus
on this very page
That could move you
And change the way you see the world
Or even yourself!
I could
But
I’m tired
Maybe tomorrow

I watched a play on Words
And you watched me jump on conclusions
I guess my bushes are worth birds
And your mixing good solutions

You let your eyes cross a road
That led pencils into paper
I get past the fact my frog was towed
To let the fire escape her

Our suits look so similar
I guess we can call it a tie
I could not forgive a helping hand
When your all time low is so high

My factory is dripping with sweaters and books
Both of which have been red
My eye is ugly from the way it looks
And I've never seen living so dead

The tree waved goodbye
To old friends, some autumn leaves
Waving killed some more

It's been a long time.

Fields of orange trees are torn
from their roots
to make room for
a thousand empty wooden boxes to be
planted in their place
There these empty boxes wait
longing
for the warmth of a family
To be furnished
And painted
And remembered
and
How it longs
To watch kids play
safely in its living room
To have the dog trample
through it's
neatly cared for lawn
To smell dads cooking
fill every square foot
To see moms face
when she finally returns
from a long day of work
To have love absorbed into its fibers
and stand out amongst the rest
To be decorated for the passing seasons
with other things besides
rust and snow
It dreams of these
things
It knows it could be more than
just a box
So there it sits
And sighs
And waits

It's been a long time.