The Calendar Hung Itself
Does he kiss your eyelids in the morning when you start to raise your head? & does he sing to
you incessantly from the place between your bed & wall? Does he walk around all day at
school with his feet inside your shoes? Looking down every few steps to pretend he walks with
you. Does he know that place below your neck that is your favorite to be touched & does he cry
through broken sentences like I love you far too much? Does he lay awake listening to your
breath? Worried that you smoke too many cigarettes. Is he coughing now on a bathroom floor?
For every speck of tile there are a thousand more that you won't ever see but most hold inside
yourself eternally. I drug your ghost across the country & we plotted out my death. In every
city, memories would whisper, Here is where you rest. I was determined in Chicago but I dug
my teeth into my knees & I settled for a telephone & sang into your machine. You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine I kissed a girl with a broken jaw that her father gave to her. She
had eyes bright enough to burn me. They reminded me of yours. In a story told she was a little
girl in a red-rouge, sun-bruised field & there were rows of ripe tomatoes where a secret was
concealed. & it rose like thunder, clapped under our hands. & it stretched for centuries to a
diary entry's end where I wrote, You make me happy when the skies are gray You make me
happy the skies are gray & gray & gray. Well the clock's heart it hangs inside its open
chest with its hands stretched towards the calendar hanging itself but I will not weep for those
dying days. For all the ones who have left there are a few that stayed. & they found me here
and pulled me from the grass where I was laid.
