Almost

“…I loved you/like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’t happen….”

– Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem

____________

You’re like a weathered photograph I carry around, a picture of something I’ll never touch

or see again,

ever. I pull

you out every now and then,

but if….

I watch the softness behind your face, beyond the set-straight line of your lips, behind the silent exterior.

Pictures don’t talk.

I imagine the tenderness that lies in the stillness between two bodies, heaving, exhausted and sweaty from fucking, when

you’re trying to catch your breath and not die of satisfaction.

We never made

it

there

but I can still recall some
breathlessness and intensity.

But I’m sure I know what your lips

feel like, I know the softness that drummed at my ears as you spoke gently

to me.

The timing was always

wrong, always

that’s the way

when I think of coulda, shoulda

woulda.

The goddamn timing.

But sometimes I want to see the dark pools of your eyes shining in the moonlight,

peering down into mine.

I’d even watch that blackness flash with rage if it meant the chance to hold and soothe your blinding fury, wrapping you into my arms and calming the storm within your bones,

the one that brews and looms black and always so

far in the distance,

forbidding entrance.

We are that part in a movie where

the audience is on the edge of

their seats waiting….waiting

for the chance encounter of the two

strangers that aren’t really,

so close, and it changes

the whole storyline but

we are anticlimactic and it all sweeps

by in a few and then

it’s

over.

Maybe I’d sit cross-legged on a bed and you’d play a song on your guitar. You’d laugh at my

tears as they rolled down my cheeks

and you’d play and play, the gentleness washing over me and leaking

out my face.

I’d probably tell you about how I

imagined this a hundred times,

I’d probably be too needy

and it would all be lost.

I’m the wrecking ball you never

knew you didn’t need.

You don’t know me really,

but I know

you.

And I

remember.

Only memories remain, and nobody makes movies about things that never happen,

but they are enough

to sustain me in the dark and still night, when I can steal

a few moments for what

might have been.

*-V.