Distant Language

the words I speak

don’t sound as good over the phone

you gotta hear them in person

you gotta hear them alone 

you gotta hear the tone 

and all the inflections 

map out the slick movement of my lips 

as they depart from each other to start dancing

the soft airless breath

I take before my lisp try to escape my

tongue twists and interrupts my train of thought

and run on sentence about

love, beauty and the after life 

Its not enough to just

guess what that feels like

or ask me to repeat them twice

over a cellular device 

You gotta hear them right

You gotta hear them in person

You gotta hear them alone

the year you survived

peaking out the window of my life

into yours and into others

into lover’s old phones and arms

we said we grew tired of

we got bored of singing the blues

and watching the news

with city views and nothing to do

so we went to find clues of our old selves

the ones we lost sometime in March

at the start and the fall, the beginning of it all

we concentrated too firmly on loose ends

and real friends kept us accountable

thank god for humility and candles

lit to bring light to the best part of us

that was just doing our best to

stay alive and stay afloat

yet, stayed under covers

for longer than we anticipated

because the blanket was weighted,

and the load was heavy,

the tears were wet,

our hands were too

from wiping the faces of

others we knew

we realized right then

we had nothing to prove