Some Poems I Had Written A Lifetime Ago When I Was Sad

I had played my piano for you,

notes slipping in and out of my fingers

full of unuse and neglect,

sweaty because of the one thing I couldn’t control.

The music flowed in my heart and

got lost in translation

as I hit each key and missed the others.

Still I let you hear me play,

I trusted you to hear the melody

within the lapses of musical judgement.

I trusted you to see through me,

and perhaps, I muse, once you did.

But that quickly faded with time

because you couldn’t be bothered to think of me,

of Me before you,

and it wore me down.

Then you left me in a shamble,

left me as broken as the notes translated through

the power of my fingers,

and I solved that problem the way I did any other,

I cried and I wrote,

the pen in my hand sturdier than all the

french horns echoing in my heart.

I lost a poem somewhere in between

finding a paper and a pen,

sitting alone in the front row of a movie theatre.

The perfect song came on,

gibberish noises in gibberish ears,

and I felt empowered to talk about the

comfort of the big screen and the smell of stale popcorn,

and how,

even though it was the middle of summer,

I could feel the crisp winter air blow against my hair.

Can you read me like you read an ultrasound?

Eyes round and squinting in the darkness,

looking among the sea of grays and black,

to find things that look less gray

and more black.