There was no need to ever
stop and ask
if you were listening
when I was mid-ramble.
But I would anyway.
It's true, you remembered everything,
heard me above a football game,
I'd stop mid sentence, and you
hung on every word on the phone,
attentive to any thought that passed
by my lips.
I think you must have really
loved me for a while.

When you
left me, I never completely
picked myself back up
off the ground.
No one was there to listen.
Things escalated,
I got
lost in my mind,
fell to pieces this summer.
Homeless,
I needed to leave,
run away and brave the
farmlands of America,
get back to where
I started,
find the easy, unassuming
cornfields of my youth
to hide away in for a while.

I called you at the end.
You know how you said
you were always listening?
Feisty and broken and living in my car.
Wild like a cornered animal,
with darting, untrusting eyes.
It was too late for me to talk.
I wonder if you blame yourself.

We got drunk
because a part of you will always
want me, and slept together
in your new apartment that
I was a stranger in.
Do you remember the way my nails
would dig into you?
"Tell me you love me,"
I pleaded that night.
Do you listen
still
to things I used to say
in your head?
You left me so
long ago, but I know
the voices of ghosts
don't know how
to keep time.

I was ***** a month before.
I don't know any other way
to tell you.
I didn't know him.
Went out with him, hoping to meet
a good listener I guess.
He
did all the talking.
I was cautious and polite, but
he got angry after a few drinks,
something came over him,
****** and serpentine.
Locked me in his truck and drove.
I couldn't fight back, and that
thrilled him. Made him want it more.
His eyes were brown, the only thing
gleaming in the dark.
Carried me through tall cedars,
pitch black night,
miles from civilization.
His own secret spot, he said.
He was so strong,
hands careless and hard.
Tried to throw me into the water,
rushing loud like dark acid, threatening to hide
any evidence.
Dispose of me easy.

You left with more dignity,
but it felt just the same.
That's why I couldn't tell you.
When I was brave and determined
and set on changing things,
I couldn't.
When I was alone and broken
and begging for it to stop,
it didn't.
How could I ask you for help that night?
You gave up listening
long before he left me wounded
and tattered
on the bank of the Sandy River.

Two thousand miles away now,
I sigh through rolling farms in
perfect solitude,
watching the same stars, fuzzy and far,
that I watched helpless through cedars
on that night that everything looked
so far away.
With practice, I learn to hear
the sound of my own thoughts
again
and then, slowly and steadily,
begin to explain myself to
the only listening ears
of corn around me.