You can always tell,
Who the introverts,
Are in the summer,
Months, we're just so pale...

while september cicadas
were singing my neighbors to sleep
i was up walking holes in my shoes
over love once lost
so many poems ago
that the only thing i remember
about the house at 38th & bluestone
is that it reeked of alcohol and is
as i'm sure of it
still saturated in perfume
and abandoned laughter
but that's not the point
give me a minute
what i'm trying to say
is i always thought god
enjoyed watching things leave me
it makes me wonder
what was on his mind
that night in september
when i stooped to cough
or tie my shoelaces
i no longer remember why
but i recall their trajectory
the way gravity cradled my hands
and brought them crashing back to earth like a 747
they landed inches away
from a scrap of crumpled loose leaf
folded in half like the smiles
of my relatives on a holiday truce
you see, lately i've been looking for scars in the newspaper
i find myself checking the obituary
for my former selves since the day i found your suicide letter
maybe that's why i can never explain my obsession with history
maybe archeology is just a funeral
in reverse
maybe hell is just rewinding home movies
or watching confetti
turn back into photographs
i never told anyone
the reason the doors to the gun cabinet in my family's house are locked not because they are afraid
i will take my life
but because sometimes
i sing them birthday songs
on the day you died
it makes me think
of how rooms only echo
when they are empty

*you know
i never echoed until you died

do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me