To: Don when it was possible.

I would have more patience with you
if warm air heaving over cut grass
didn't stain the room so humid.
Didn't heat my thoughts into losing form
If the last three hours waiting for you
would turn themselves in
like some amnesty for poor excuses,
You might have convinced me some afternoon

That would daze just like this one.
Except for quick coldness
now wrapping around
the tense of my limbs,
Don,
I am sitting in a waiting room again,
Learning how much of the breath in me
turned wind to your face.
the way how money and mother
wish to revive you again,
the way I didn't understand you.

I asked you, who will come after,
who would carry the inner tremors
of strain in your laughter,
too humble to think
you affected nobody out here.
But there will be no
gun salute at your funeral,
shooting skyward
makes a hurricane of bullets,
raining a memory
too recognizable to your flesh,
to your hands,
to my disarmed way of arguing life with you.
Just that my words needed not to come through
this way.

Copyright © 2010 Arielle John