Let's talk, you and I,
let's talk about the end.
Discuss, with me, how it'll
conclude and where,
now that is,
we're meant to go.
Let's talk about growing up.
Growing old.
Let's talk about the light
and how it fades and bleeds.
Let's talk about the surprising,
and ever growing,
number of yesterdays behind us.
And the number still ahead of him,
because he hasn't even had one yet.

I want to find courage and depth.
I want the strength to face death.
I want you and I to believe we're not next.
I want to take this land with you,
length and breadth.

How we're still young,
but how that measure changes.
Falling sand, love.
You and I.
Falling sand in an ocean of sand.
I want the world for him,
and for you.
I wish, so often I wish,
that I could stop it briefly.
Just have this day for awhile.
But I understand.
I know what stopping looks like,
and I've seen so much of it.
Stopped and stopping.
Too much.
Falling sand.

I think, or I've heard,
that love will see us through.
I don't really believe that.
Do you?
I wish it could be true.

Let's visit this subject,
after perhaps a little time to think.
I don't know what waits,
and frankly,
I think it might be nothing.
But you know that, by now,
you know so much about me.
Let's talk, you and I,
about how we're closer now to the end
than the beginning.

Drops of blood, a little each day,
have become my love letters to you.
Scraps from labors rendered,
meals paid in sweat and fatigue,
the only gifts I can give.
I don't know if the rules are the same.
Once upon and long ago seem
removed from me by oceans
of various "who can recall"s and
"I don't give a ****"s.
I'm not sure if it was ever easier
or better.
I only know that it is hard and
I am worse.
My god, how you can greet.
You hug and you kiss and you express.
It mystifies me, these strange magic
that you and yours possess.
It is alien to me and to mine.
We are not a talk of love kind of people,
my family.
I don't know how to whisper beauty at you.
I only know the work.
And the work, my love,
The work is for you.

There are echoes in our children.
Echoes of the people that put them here.
He'll have your eyes or her laugh.
They'll be made of compromise.
Now, of course there are the things.
Everybody has the Things.
Things that I do, that no one else does.
The smile you seem to have invented.
Make me feel like I'm important with your eyes.
*******.
What have I left you but echoes?
I want to give you something forever.
Something that doesn't fade, but I'm...

Smoke escaping a sewer lid mingles with street light.
Impermanent and forever, mixed in a moment.
When the rain starts it adds something to the dance
of light and smoke.
It adds another layer of
Just this Once.
My god, we are a moment.

I hope, when we meet, you'll forgive me.
Kid, I really do.
I'm all spiderwebs and yesterday, now.
I coulda, shoulda, woulda been and didn't.
You're echoes staring down what could be.
We are a little impermanent
a little forever.

We can learn to fade away.
We can learn to let sleeping dogs.
Together, we can learn to hope.
To dream.
The three of us could be yesterday, tomorrow.

Once a giant they fall through night skies
and into the empty loam where truth lies.
The greatest among them, coward now and small.
It wavers and wans where once it stood proud and tall.
All things, they are told, eventually fade and die.
All things retreat rather than give or try.

And so they crash through dim and distant tropospheres,
through fatally close and relevent new world fears.
They are trapped by binding digital text.
Caught forever in one server rack or the next.
They are ancient relics that once screamed hope at a void.
They are now cold, ignored and most of all annoyed.

Notice me, no one hears them cry into the intangible nothing.
Notice me! they keen and wail and empty makes the noise ring.
They are surrounded by their own unheard pleas.
They are bound to die forgotten and on their knees.
And what then becomes of us? You may ask.
Who, if not the giants and the old gods, will bring us to task?

There is no longer a force pushing us to crisis.
There is fear and there is cold and here is echoed lifeless.
And are we willing to reinvent the past? To pay these prices?
To walk with old giants and call them good and righteous.
If we were better we could fix this open blindness.
If only we weren't weak, tired and so bitterly indecisive.

If we only had one small chance. One good clue.
If only we could make manifest choice and brand new.
In glades we sip from blades of forest grass a rejuvenating dew.
If only we numbered in many and not in so damnably few.
If we could turn these broken gears and feel red rather than blue.
If we could be anything but ******* me and ******* you.

I've unpacked the letters you wrote,
and read them word for word and aloud.
I read them for the fire and for the sea.
I read them under millions of stars.
And I read them for you, love.
I read them for me.

I buried the wreck in the ground and walked away.
I promised to forget the noise.
Forget the pain and pretend away the bitter.
I try so hard to fix.
I try so hard, darling.
I remember everything.

I am remorse in the shape of coffins.
I am waves crashing against a shore of fretting.
I am worried hands fidgeting with the buttons on my coat.
I am the beads of sweat running down your back.
I am regret in the shape of a man.
I am the hollow sound of distant bells.
I am spoken word prayers ending up nowhere.

These things that we built are meant for decay.
We are proudly bound for pyres.
Words burn across the night sky and illuminate.
They tell us what we are. What we could be.
What we are not and should be.
What we were supposed to be.

Whisper me your secrets, dear.
I'll keep them. Press them tight to me.
I'm all read letters and buried wrecks.
I'm unanswered prayers to nowhere.
I'm disposable.
Use me. Let me course through you.
Let me find your heart by travelling your arteries.
Let me be the sore, the ache that reaches your core.

I'm putting the letters away.
I  remember everything, love.
I do.
And you and me?
We have so much in common,
and that hurts worse than I can express.
I pack them away in the wreck and walk away.
I vow on the fire and on the sea.
And I vow on you, love.
I try to forget about me.

I will dream in technicolor failures!
I will pass time waiting on the lawn.
Bored and vapid and given pause to yawn.
I'll send my hopes in colored mailers.
Drowned in nostalgia and memory,
another 30-30 something casualty.
And together we chase the white picket,
acid washed American dream.
And with loaded backroom schemes
we seek to find and punch the given ticket.

Where there was two we invite three.
He'll have ten fingers and ten toes.
Wide masculine shouldered and elbows.
He'll be, I hope, a lot you and a very little me.
He'll have a chance, ******* it, he will.
He'll be alive and screaming and needing.
His mind and body young and always feeding
He will draw from this earth until his fill.

I hope for so much more than I have got.
We take on water so fast without balers.
I dream of tomorrow in technicolor failures.
Help me, love. I'm twisted into a knot.
I need so badly to understand these things we do.
Our rings and our tiny king's teething rings.
I need to be kind and true and bold.
I need so badly to have and to hold
him and you.

We left him so little and wished him so much.
Isn't it a sad twist of fate?
Isn't it just something you love to hate?
Ruins where buildings should be. Nice touch.

I don't know how it got to safety last,
and cable television lifeblood.
I don't know when the dreams
got eaten out of you
and you turned into this.
Nonsense.
We were born screaming and unprepared,
we weren't meant for anything.
We weren't meant for this.
Was anything meant for this?

If we have nothing manifest
before us and no expectations
for better, and we don't, friend.
Let us be great, instead.
Let us lift those in need.
Let us sing the songs that bring peace.
I do not mean pacify, I mean peace.
Let us love the way we wish the world loved.
Let us become warmth and light.
And why not?
We aren't supposed to do anything else.

We are form seeking purpose.
We are lyrics without meaning.
We search for it, when we should create it.
We dig when we should build.
My God we can build.
What exactly do we think we are,
if not masters of our destiny?

Nonsense.