Recently I have started writing poetry I call "Dialogue Poetry". It's a poem where two people are talking back and forth. Sometimes there is a face attached to the other side of a Dialogue Poem and sometimes it's just a voice. Other times I'm watching from afar, not involved in the conversation at all... Other times I'm in another person's body. It's expiremental and fun.
I don't remember meeting you for the first time, don't remember the way you shook my hand or the way you might have smiled. I don't remember meeting you for the first time. But I know that sometime soon after, I learned how to sing again.
I don't remember the way you might have shone when I wrote my first letters again.
Scrawled onto the back of some lost ticket stub (for words are always things crafted from broken shards).
Or the way you might have gone numb at the way my broken-up words sat so plainly on the paper, like maybe they could save you before you saved them.
Like maybe the poetry of childhood was written long before someone could comprehend what the word "percosious" meant.
I don't remember hearing you laugh for the first time.
You don't know the kind of pain he described that morning.
"It's not the kind that's easy to explain." Not the kind of feeling, he told you, that's easy to wash away with a little soap.
You're not sure what to call that kind of pain. The kind that brings you to the dark bathroom each night, sitting on the clammy tile floor.
Near the toilet. In case you decide that maybe it would feel better to flush the water down the bottom of the drain, to watch it wash away some feeling you didn't even know was smeared on you.
He says he wonders why the crickets keep singing through all this horror. “It's because they can't see how the stream washes away the blood."
You tell him to hold his breath.
Maybe it's the kind of pain, you guess, that hides in the dry spot under the sink,
It’s like they say when the sky floats above gravity, like it was purposefully put higher than me just to intimidate the rest of us.
It’s like they say when the ground breaks free from its roots and crumbles in my shoes, like somehow it’s supposed to be this dirty when we all fall to pieces.
It’s like they say when we laugh as if the sun never floated on the mountain top this morning; still
holding hope in something that never loved you back. Something that can’t pull together as well as it used to.
