We’d sit on the roof,
the spring sun will remind us that summer isn’t the only friendly season.
And we’d chain smoke our way through rays and rays of sunlight.  Both of us reading,
God knows what, but filtering the tar of the world out of our souls and replacing it with fiction.

Sometimes it’s in his room, as he
strums on his guitar, symphonies he may just forget by the morn.
And I’ll sit, cross legged on your rolling bed,
figuring out why mine never look as good as yours.
Is it too little?  Am I too much?
But because I’ve rolled two today, you’ll reward me with three of your own.  Only one requires our ****** house grinder.

And I’ll ask you to play that song from three sleeps ago
-when we both sat in our separate rooms, together.  And you will.
And you’ll pass it back to me, after two or three deep pulls and exhale through your fingers on the strings of your guitar.

And I’ll study this joint and realize,
that I did, indeed, put way too much tobacco in all my cigarettes today.

I wonder what the inside of your head sounds like.
I don’t care for the look of it, figure
it resembles the inside of my chest when my soul exploded.  Coffee stained walls and lipstick kissed ceilings.  Liquor drenched carpets and frantically ****** fingerprints all over the fogged windows. Yeah,
I know what it looks like.  But what does it sound like?
I want to know if makes the same sound our hearts would make when we’d lay side by side.
Hand in hand.  The way otters sleep, so we’d never float away from each other in our dreams.
Or maybe,
a long pitched scream.
As sweet as a child’s happiness on Christmas morning. Or as terrifying
as a woman under her lovers fist, as he pounds his insecurities into her stomach.
Nobody can see the bruises there.
His ego is intact – their secret is safe.

I bet it smells like laundry detergent.
The generic kind – the one that mimics a summers breeze and a springs bloom.
At least, that’s what the label says.  But there’s no label for the sound.
I need to know what it sounds like.

I need to know if my voice is on repeat in there.
Me saying I love you, on our best days or,
I hate you from our worst; perhaps, a combination of the two.
Is that why you left?  To clear your head of the bittersweet melody of my emotions running amuck.
Were those words pressed against your temporal lobe?  Is that where the temper came from?
I’m sorry.  No,
I’m not sorry; I want it to sound like a sorry.
Whether whispered from the darkest corners of your cranium or
shouted from the top of your brain.  I just hope it sounds like sorry.
For promising me the flowers and teddy bears and county fair rides.
For promising me a love so fierce and so strong.  A love so true and so brave.

And for giving me just that.
Then leaving me to the sounds in my own head,

which sounds like the inside of a jazz club,
by the way.  As Suggie Otis and Miles Davis and Etta James and Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong croon about a fierce love, a strong love, a true and brave love.
And I can see it as well as I can hear it.
You, front row centre, sipping warm apple cider and holding hands with a woman,
who’ll leave no sound byte in your skull, and me, in the back,
with my voice box in my hands.

Maybe I’m sorry after all.