Poem Madness: Anyone listening....

There once was a girl followed by an invisible raincloud
And she went around knocking on doors until one day a boy opened up and saw her drenched in words that had never been said

And she looked at him with her coffee black eyes and whispered
“I’ve never been able to apologize, but if you let me in, I could learn.”
And so the girl learned how to play the piano

And on days when the boy and girl would come home from work frustrated and scared that they were taking their lives in the completely wrong direction
She would sit down
And she would play

And she would play about all the emotions she had seen and all the people they were attached to and how they never seemed to have time for hers

And the boy would wrap his scared arms around her waist and breath his story into her
And the apartment would swell with gilded notes and anyone listening a floor up and a floor down
Would close their eyes and think
Isn’t that magnificent?

When it was all over they would lie in bed and he would whisper “baby, I don’t think it can get much worse”
And she would tug on his shoulders and let her words trickle down his spine and say
“I don’t think you’re allowed to lie to me like that”

Years passed and the boy and girl both met people who made them look at themselves differently

People who made the girl’s coffee black eyes less like a caffeine burst of hunger and more like eerie black beads
People who made the boy’s curly forest of hair feel less like a haven and more like a hunting ground
Instead of slipping away into dark alley ways with beautiful strangers—and they were beautiful

The girl would sit down and she would play
And she would play about all the things she wanted to see and all the things she wanted to unseen and the second list was always…longer

And the boy would shoot glassware to the ground like cannon balls in an attempt to tell a story of how he had watched his father hurt his mother but had never done anything about it

And the apartment swirled with orange sparks and something that the boy was so sure was close to magic

And anyone listening a floor up or a floor down
Would put their heads down and whisper
Isn’t that haunting?

As the seasons passed and winter chills ripped the fall leaves down
The boy and the girl found themselves paralyzed with the realization that they wouldn’t always be around
And the girl sat down and she would play

And she played about a little girl who was so in love with beautiful things that she had tripped and fallen over so many slender jaw bones and hazel eyes—And before the boy could ask her how she got those scrapes on her knees she went to play about the kind of love that had kept her alive

And it started with his name and it ended with the tip of his tongue
And the boy admitted that a very, very long time ago his school had convinced him that there was magic
in his veins
So he opened them up to see if he could find them

And she stood there
So angry at him
Because how in the world did he not know she was coming from him?

And the girl who was perplexed by the fact that sometimes you could eat breakfast for dinner had never come so close to hitting someone

And anyone listening a floor up and a floor down…

- N xx