Shuffled Through

A week roils your steps despite blue skies, the choice is not yours. I sat in a bar on Avenue B in the early afternoon and read a book, pretending it wasn't mine: it was. A mountain of words build inside me, a landslide, spring arrives at last in the city and it's more beautiful than you could possibly have remembered, all lilac scents and cherry blossom seas on the lawn; my heart bleeds and bleeds and I decide for once not to patch it up and leave it to its usual scarring but see what happens if I just let it sit there, each beat pounding thick, sticky, dark honesty into the May evenings: some days I think I'll drown in it, some days my lungs forget to breathe but I walked through the Lower East Side on a warm Friday evening with the neighbors on the stoop, with the soothing cacophony of a city that always did fine without you, and I remembered in a finite life every second matters but in the end we are just matter; in the end this heart will have bled itself dry but there's a landslide waiting behind it, once or twice I've been on the floor but the grime is familiar and I will bathe it in my words, and the words will wash it clean, the words will tell me I do not need this heart now in the end we are dust but ink is forever so
mean
what you
say.