A mop, I exist to soak up your footprints. Maybe you thought butterflies smashed between blank pages would satisfy me, but I'm chasing the wind made by their wings. I pause between radio stations looking for your voice, sent back in time through the stereo of an idling car you walk past. How are you ever going to get rid of me when even I can't make myself go?

 

 

This is a retrospective- 10 years out 

 

You would think that so many years would make me immune to it.   You might say that since someone else wrote these words they don't have much  effect on me and that I am detached from them.   You could say that.  You would be wrong.  

 

Don't look back, but when you pass me in the street, hand me your broken buttons and your empty coffee cups, because I'm panhandling, out of pride, and I'll take anything you can safely spare.

 


Just because I did not write this, doesn't make it false.   Just because they are her words doesn't mean that don't apply.  Then.  Now.

                                        Close your eyes and think about the first time you heard that song- years ago.

Does it make you feel less now,  10 years later?    

Do you favorite movies stop speaking to you?  Have you forgotten the best lines?  

 

Is your favorite city still there?  Do you still have the T shirt?  The shot glass?   The postcard?   The broken heart?    Did ten years ruin any of this?   

No.   Because certain things are not diminished.   They just become a bit faded. Sepia.  

 

Ten years.  A decade. There is a word for it, because it is substantial.  A landmark,  a specific designation.   But it is not a word for things forgotten or

insignificant.  It is the opposite.  It is a word that signifies relevance; importance.  

 

The remembering brings it back to us and keeps it close to our hearts.  Forever.  

 

There's a place in my heart where I've been hiding your pencil stubs, your runaway pocket change, and the odd fading rose. But it's still empty.  I'm a glutton with a hollow leg, and it's never enough.

 

 

 


all italics are from gunpoint

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