I should have lived to thank you more,
where the blue dots and the green dots
met on a stormy porch-front streaming
crack-paint, blank and dirt from years
of games on the blurry tabletops.

Years of games.

We should have walked in the fields,
you the tide swelling and falling and
ultimately disgorging universes of all
you used to know: the good and the small
and the stern and the silly and the cruel.

The good and the small.

He will take your place in the shows,
in all the nightlies and the dailies,
grey hat and black sash. He is taller
by far, and you can't look up to someone
that unabashedly taller than you.

Grey hat and black sash.

You would have made time for me between
strides on the honest diamond of the sky,
and I? I might not listen at all, but
the pearl in the glasses, those awful
brown glasses would stay with me.

I might not listen at all.

She sat with us many evenings as the
winds raked the small lights of our speech.
What has become of her, I wonder more
frequently, but sleep with my head
on my hands all the same.

Sleep with my head on my hands.

They call me under the door, they call.
They fill me with themselves until I'm out.
Just what they want from me and less. Still,
they can't tell me the good and the small,
The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.

The fact that deep down I am nothing at all.