blink, and
you won’t miss it

we live out of the corners of our
bright and blinded eyes,
out of time and cracking wise, yeah,
cracking up, we’re breaking up
forever with our histories and
memories, our elegies,
belonging to a family
so much bigger than the earth
in widescreen beaches, smoke and girls
we find our worth, we find our reason
in the puddles we don’t jump,
in the changing of our seasons we see
patterns, we break patterns, we
find new ways to try to matter
to a fading photograph
that turns her back when all you need
is something to rely on, someone
to rest your tired mind on,
some strange minute in a waltz
you saw a million miles away
and sometimes i can’t stand it, sometimes
i can’t even handle
all the time that throws itself at me
the wind that screams and yells at me
the way she breathes
the way she sleeps
the ocean of inches
that lay between
our shoulders
in a sailboat bed-
she’s lost at sea,
i’m done and said
so long so long ago
and still there’s something i don’t know
because there’s a place that i’ve not been
in those wild eyes in which
i learned to swim,
yeah,
there’s so much we can’t seem to see
when we live
in our
periphery