Your initials
are the first three letters
in memory.
They are lines
drawn from train-
tracks and the veins
of dead leaves,
they are shuttered breaths
in the remnants
of your chicken-scratch
handwriting.
They are sealed,
grave symbols
darkening in your grave.
It’s true,
I’ve kept what I could
of your lie, your life,
but these shards
have all but scattered
to the whim of faded photographs,
to the drawl of faucet drips
and metronomes,
and silence.
Now memory serves
its own black devices.
Now you prowl
hollow alleys,
leaving footsteps
in tainted tunnel's
throats.
Now your hands
spread in the shade
of trees we once climbed
and your dark hair lingers
in unkempt blades of grass.
Every day you’re with me
when the sun bleeds
your last wounds
into a night so cold
the stars shiver.
And every night
above my lonely breath
I can spot a stranger
on the road
carelessly walking
into the wilderness.
When I see him
I want to stop.
Stand up, call out to him,
and go to him.
I want to cradle
my hand on his silk heart
and tell him what I couldn’t
tell you.
Did you think of me
as the train charged down?
Did you hesitate to the frigid
sting of the tracks?
Did your mother’s voice call you home?
Or was it your father’s indifference
that kept you still?
Did you consider the dawn
at seventeen and beautiful?
Or the smell of rain on asphalt?
The ribbon in the taste of another’s lips?
The laughter of leaves in the air?
What terrible disintegration
came upon you then
while the wind kissed you goodbye?
In the impending light,
did the stars fade to black?
Was there music in the engine swells?
The ocean: you saw it only once,
you told me the measureless waves
kept coming, one caused the next,
kept plunging, down and down,
until of a sudden
the whole of the sea
had touched your fingers
in a single wave sweeping
the sand.
Was that what life was like
flashing before your eyes?
Was it kinder than your memories?
Did you hear its foam
in your last breath?
Were you happy
as peace
fractured
your solemn heart
with death?
Did you smile?
If I knew the shadows in your face
pulled like a tide to the dawn
of your smile, then the jarring horn
of the charging train
was a requiem to your falling eyes,
if I knew your heart beat content
then tonight it’s reborn as a bomb in my skin
sure to fire bright enough
to wake the blind
and burn every word I’ve ever written.
If I knew you smiled –
this poem was over before it started.
Its ashes now exchanged with yours
and, crossed in wings of clouds and wind,
the maelstrom of their submission
unfolds a rain of every tear
I’ve shed for you. Tonight I’ll drink them all
in toast of your name:
Matthew Erwin Mahlios,
until I’m drunk with peace.
And I’ll take this foolish pen
and these hopeless songs
and drown them in the gutter
without a care, and with a smile,
because I knew you smiled.
But – I don’t know anything.
Memory is an echo
that grows and grows
in the womb of my dreams
until I wake up and I’m screaming
with the horn of a train
buried somewhere beyond the window
fading into the past.