Disconnected like a shaft of light
I inhabit the room in exile
sifting through papers,
a record of what has been reinvented.
I have a postcard here
a postcard I never sent,
and can’t now
your address has changed so often
I sometimes don’t have the strength
to find you.
Wish I was a bird. Wish I was.
You’re doing the same things
The roller coaster, the hills and jerking you along
Never pulling into the gate.
Never going home. I can’t either.
Looking me in the eye
in the middle of a storm,
the wine grows lower in the bottle
and these nights when the sky is heavy
or I am heavy and there is nothing
to bear the weight of it:
your obligations.
Wish you were a bird. Wish you were.
I scrubbed the kitchen
so it would be clean
so it would be like other things in the world
that you have wanted and I am not.
I’d like to spend Saturday mornings
with you reading poems or maybe just walking
to the abandoned pier
or other places
that remind me of everything
we should say to each other
before it’s too late
before the chance has past
before the time has past
before my love like a red red rogue
runs with parched lips to the water.
Wish I wasn’t a bird. Wish I wasn’t.