This Is A Fire Door Never Leave Open

Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room.

Half illuminate a face before they disappear.

You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling.

I breathe out smoke against the window, trace the letters in your name.

Our letters sound the same

Full of all our changing

That isn't change at all.

All straight lines circle sometime.

You said "Somewhere there's a box full of replacement parts to

All the tenderness we've broken or let rust away.

Somewhere sympathy is more than just a way of leaving.

Somewhere someone says 'I'm sorry.'

Someone's making plans to stay."

So tell me it's okay.

Tell me anything or

Show me there's a pull,

Unassailable that will lead you there,

From the dark, alone,

To benevolence that you've never known,

Or you knew when you were four

And can't remember.

Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams,

And the silence knows what your silence means

And your metaphors as mixed as you can make them

Are linked like days together.

I still hear trains at night, when the wind is right.

I remember everything

Lick and thread this string

That will never mend you

Or tailor more

Than a memory of a kitchen floor,

Or the fire-door

That we kept propping open.

And I love this place

The enormous sky,

And the faces, hands

That I'm haunted by

So why can't I forgive these buildings,

These frameworks labeled "Home"?