If You Were Here, You'd Be Home Right Now.

Cold coffee and a pocket full of change
were all that I ever needed.
Bare notebooks and plastic-covered pens,
Grippy and smooth.
And you were here
And all I ever needed
was right
here.

The days were long,
and the nights were late.
and the moon peered out
lazily when we called it.
And you were here
And you were here.
The pens leaked, dried and faded, love.
They crisped and burnt.
Rings of brown ingrained into the paper
to replace the words and the feelings
those damned
feelings.
But you were here.

"Peacock," you told me.
And that was what I then needed.
The topic of my next great ball of
burning
wadded
paper.
"Chicken strips."
"Sparrows take flight!"
"Chickadees"
You taught me about the birds
and I scribbled, scribbled, scribbled
in my chicken-scratch.
Because you were here
and you were all I ever needed.

The world swirled around us,
turned, danced, dipped.
But we paid them no attention, dear.
Because we had all we ever needed.
The crinkly paper
The dried-out pens
And the caked-on coffee.

We needed no introduction
and we didn't care for conclusions.
But the body, how we loved the body!
And the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives
like our own children.
Remember
Green
Wrangled
Sky
Hair.
Because all we ever needed
was right
Here.

You saved it, didn't you?
Even after our inevitable conclusion
and all the words we loathed,
like
Loathe
Tired
Dry
Bored.
And all I needed
was right there.

No the world didn't stop spinning,
but after our self-obsessed meandering
we finally took notice.
There was evil and hate
and love and satisfaction.
Bright Sunday mornings
and slow drivers.
birds
and slow goodbyes.
and lingering,
quite a bit of lingering, actually.
But that was all I really needed.

What I set out was
not a sappy love poem.
And what I did
was not the broken attempt.
What I knew
was the weight of humanity.
And you said it was enough,
just enough.
And maybe
all I ever needed
was
right
here.

-------

Merry Christmas, all.