I never got to say goodbye,
never got to touch your hand—
so many times I tried— I try.

You evaded me, you were so sly,
clowning about with your band—
I never got to say goodbye.

My father called to tell me why,
his voice hollow, canned—
So many times I tried— I try.

That final day I began to cry—
my mother’s tears run on command—
I never got to say goodbye.

There was not one dry eye,
“Let go”— I hear a man demand—
So many times I tried— I try.

Even now, I wish to fly,
To say ‘this was not the plan’—
I never got to say goodbye,
So many times I tried— I try.

There is a boy walking, maybe ten or eleven,
a skateboard under one arm,
his shirt branded with
THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.
And I wonder, what did she say?
Did she say she liked his tricks
or his ratty sweatshirt?
Did he blush,
swishing his hair in response,
exuding confidence and cockiness, in the mean time remembering his mother,
calling out to him before he left the house.
Did she say “Son,
don’t forget your helmet!”
Even though he was already gone—
Or was she really a he,
who sat him down a few months ago and said
he’d be gone for awhile
that he’d see him soon—
it’s been six months—
and maybe, when the boy heard this, he ran out.
And maybe when he gets older maybe he will run out more often,
to hang out with those who are deemed to be
“the wrong crowd”
and he will be drunk and high,
stumbling under the streets,
above the lights,
hearing-but-not-hearing everything that she is telling him.
She is telling him the secrets of the universe.

He shot himself in the head,
or he hung himself from a tree,
or he swallowed a whole bunch of pills.
Not that it matters much, after all, what’s done is done.
I can hear you praying each night (you think I’m asleep).
You never ask him why, rather, you ask him what the pills tasted like,
ask if he thought you should try them. I watch you try them.
You spit them back out, repulsed, saying they’re sour,
and the next night I hear you praying, quieter, yet, asking
what the bullet felt like in his head, in his chest or wherever he shot himself,
asking if it brought inner peace, if it brought solace or silence. He is silent.
The next morning your eyes
and the chasms beneath them search mine, scour the pupils, the lens, the iris,
thinking you will find answers since he provided none but
I have none— I’ve never been a good student.
I’ve never known the answer.
Whenever I was called on in class, I was always silent,
but I always had a doodle,
or scrap of a poem, the letters so close together
but so far from making sense,
like you, when you come home from your buddy’s,
your eyes red and weepy because you’ve hit the bowl again and you’re coming back down.
Somewhere between the melting windows and the flaming couch, you tell me you’ve dropped acid again
and I try to lay you down but you refuse because you will drown; the bed is an ocean, after all,
and you have no idea how to swim.

I am never more human
than when I’m riding next to someone
who makes me shudder.
I am human as I sit and I wonder about their life
the way their hair curls to the left instead of the right,
if it was on purpose or done with curlers, or if everything in life is just accidental.
She probably didn’t care which way her hair curled. Neither do I. But I do care
about the way her ankles look with them crossed, about the way her eyes are angled
out the window, about the way her jaw clenches when we hit a bump. It probably clenches
the same way when her boyfriend is ******* her.
I sit on the bus, shuddering and wondering about the bus riders’ lives. They’re probably the same
as mine, as yours, as the guy’s who is behind me, digging his knees
into the green leather of my seat, which is cracking at the edges. I see a piece
of yellow foam pushing out the edge, and I cannot resist the urge to play with it.
The person who sat here before me probably did, too. We cannot help but play with things,
always hoping we’re never the one to finally break it.
We are all the same, we all live to love, or love to live,
or maybe we don’t,
but we take comfort in knowing that we will all die one day
whether its on purpose or by accident, though it is always accidental.
But maybe we really are different, after all,
we’ve come a long way, from discovering fire to discovering better ways to put it out,
concocting new chemicals to cure every ailment,
fabricated or organic, physical or mental,
and I cannot get out of my mind that
our minds revolve around the world which revolves around the stars,
the ones in the theaters and the ones in the skies, the ones on the covers of magazines
like People and Science Weekly—inside they’re half advertisements—
how else do we advance in the world without cash?
Their covers are full of sequins and *** tips and shuttles with surveillance
cameras snapping photos as they watch our every move
from behind the cover of the planets who grin with the knowledge they will never reveal,
because they, too, are plotting against us.
Tonight we are under the cover of the blankets and I am watching her just as we are watched by
the planets that spin and the stars that shine and the moon that just wants to see the light of day
because she only knows the dark of night,
and the eclipse of her *******
eclipses the eclipse of the moon,
and the cross around her neck is blinding me with reflected light and reflected values
and I can’t look away but I can’t look at it
because I want to deny it but I want to accept it and
I marvel at how one taste of her
can show me what it is like to be saved.