Meet me, once again, at the breakwall
where we will spend time sitting
reminiscing about times we spent wishing
on a sinking star for more time to spend.
Let’s go fishing for our selves
in snapshots of past lives
and see if we can find,
in this murky water of nostalgia,
some kind of definition.
We will quest forth, finding more questions
than answers, and accepting them
with a peaceful resignation
we could never have in our raging youth.
I’d talk about how
we used to debate
with our words
carved into primitive weapons
for savage discussion -
To win arguments with each other
doing battle for days
not realizing that language
was not evolved for the purpose of combat
but rather, the opposite.
We’d watch the waves wash ashore
all the places and people we’d been
all the bits and pieces of past tragedies
will lay before us
like a thousand-year-old shipwreck.
We will laugh together
the way you do,
when you see the heavy black clouds
storming off toward a distant somewhere
and they seem smaller somehow
less frightening.
You’d say something about how
we were the most obsessed with our mortality
when we were furthest from ever facing it.
And we’ll sit there for a while
just thinking about that.
JM Romig 2014