Your Other Left

I've been keeping busy
Keeping you at arm's length and breaking ice between the covers
My father was a liar, he taught me everything I know.
And as fictional as they come, he's as memorable as they go.
And I dreamt the biggest dreams in all the weeks I couldn't sleep.
Navigate the palms of promise, like the ones I couldn't keep.
Did I fall silent like a glove dropped into banks of greying snow?
Am I forgotten like your wallet, like the songs you used to know?
Now I'm asleep and you're nostalgic.
I've got twisted thoughts of murder.
Although I'd never lay a hand I dream of simple ways to hurt her
Watch me leave without a note, just your name in every song
But I'm sure she wouldn't notice
until the wind sings through her palms.
I've been keeping busy.
Taking mirrors from bedroom walls
So I can't recognize the reflection of a
past that I've been trying hard to shatter.
I crushed the distance in my palms.
I fought like fencers through the patterns
Of a future as bright as a litho black
Got your degree, so what's the matter with you?
It can all change so quickly.
And I can't recognize...
So I've been running my soles straight to compensate
For my time running in my place
The gerbil wheel spun me 'round again
It's left me feeling jader than an august rain.
When we wrote our names in the wet cement, I felt walked on.
Waiting like a patient book to have my spine
split open and to spill my guts into memories.
Was my name simply spat on the
casket? And no flowers befall on my grave?
We're just dust to the wind.
I'm a dog-eared page of the moment you
hummed out my name like a song that we'd sang.
Your crescendo wrapped a cloth around my eyes.
To find a strength to call my own, I traced your name into this poem
Just keeping busy.
Watching loved-ones go by car and tucking good-ones into coffins.
It seems so often, we sing out the memories instead of the movements.
When I go it will feel like waking up in a well-lit
room with no memory of the excuse that I used to use.
In the post they lost your letter
I imagine that it read
You were sorry that you'd miss me
Not as sorry had we met
I took the mirror off my bedroom wall
I was growing tired of waking up next to someone I didn't know