Close your eyes and pretend for a second.
Time is a tape recorder
I can rewind and reset
today is a waltz and
I listen to it again and
                                      again
                                                  and again.
Forget the burned tape at the end,
                                                darling.
                                                      Listen to the music.
A scratched CD still
plays and the stars were so
clear and beautiful that
maybe I could be too:
The dancing girl with
wild hair,
the kind of girl you fall in love with
before never seeing again
Darling,
          could you love me for more than a
                                                              subway station?

I am fascinating in concept,
tiring in actuality:
the first hill doesn't kill Sisyphus
it's the Twenty
seventh, and
the train keeps going
whether we're on it or not.

Someday there will be
grass stains on my jeans from
where you dipped me and I fell, and
I will throw them in the washer, and
you will look at me and laugh:
Clear and beautiful like
the stars. This is waltzing,
hold my hand.
I cannot dance besides for
shuffling, I cannot sing besides for
humming, but I can love for
more than a train station.

I am the weather radar,
all reds and blues and purples,
you are the eye of the storm.

Bellbottom jeans
bright pink girl.
the old women smile at her
and she smiles in return.
She wants to ask them
(did growing up hurt as much as I'm scared it might?
does home become less of the eye of a needle,
or do I become less of a camel?
how do you wake up every morning even when everything hurts?
How do you love yourself?)
so many things
but there is no time, so
the music plays on.

Clarinets so loud you can hardly
hear the saxophone,
but it's still there.
Softly
                        assuredly
                                                    always there.
After all,
a promise is a promise,
whether the recipient hears it or not.
The music still plays
and this girl is dancing
limbs are not flailing, and smiles
do not always mean laughter.

Organizing your DVDs is
this shade of coral pink, but
the tree outside my house
is beginning to taste like
all the wrong shades of purple.
Will you pray with me?
I have always been allergic
to pine trees, but
the sap doesn't know that.
Violence is still violence when
perpetrated unknowingly, and
the sixteenth means you will have
that beautiful blue hoodie back in your hands

Someday you will teach me
how to set a volleyball, and
someday I will teach you
how to center clay.

The lights are dimming,
the dance is ending, and the
pianist had fallen asleep at the bench.
I press rewind one more time, before
I hear the checkerboard of regret.
Lemonade.
Blankets.
Red Lights.
Barbecue-ranch.

And now, the finale,
the question,
  do I ruin everything I touch?