Snuffed Matches

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

Look a man in the eye before flying off, running into the darkness

Reciprocate hope like a lit match, leave it on the sheets

For him to snuff out with tear drops

Blinking heat of fired beats

Poetry and metaphors pouring like a tongued-wall of flame

Posturing ankles gasping words from the tender

Returning to the polite distance of elbows at bus stops

Inking the casual in a smudge as if that was all that ever was

Like a ticket purchased for pocket change wheeling off

Do not ever want to be treated like that again

As if closure were contraband for the security screen to board

Impermissible tote to the confidence to see out from the window

Down to the street glazing over the pedestrians muddling the concrete

Pages written and read and retorted in silence like a spectacle

Crashing wheels of bones clanking tissue red and flung sinew

The cruelty in the power of affection repossessed

As if a body was something now nothing all in the whim of wind

Between hours of seeing future and then nothing parading in surrender

That between here and there the world died

People scoff and laugh and say move on because you have to

Because it is the only sane thing to do,

But the imagination breeds a fork of some dimension of what might have been

Of what one wished the other wished to attempt

And an entire world died,

A man saw happiness like a gust and he licked the air and felt alive

And what more is there to a world than feeling that

The rest is theater and waiting, waiting for that stick of time

To imprint and knock one’s life like the creator’s touch

To have the precipice of love singing in a god damn aria

To try, to just try to participate before the scythe slits the ladder rungs

And that’s it, that is all a man has were these chances

The last of which could be the last, never knowing and so everything falls

The whole damn show like an avalanche of supermarket canned goods

That might have lasted a zombie apocalypse

Or five New Orleans’ hurricane seasons

Who knows, but an entire world died,

To hope like that and see it fall

Without as much as a face to say goodbye to,

Nah never want to be treated like that again