Maybe at the edge
of the bridge, you’ll see
whose rope you were tugging,
while holding hands with the smoke
that exited from my
bloodstained lungs.
Maybe you’ll see to the end
of the universe, and when
you get back, you’ll hear a different
rhythm to that heartbeat,
the one you called “familiar”,
the one you said wasn’t similar
to your more recognizable
feelings, as ripples brought
from a rain, defeated.
Maybe, once you descend
into an ocean of stories,
from stories up high,
from massed pages, turning only
at those relieving sighs,
you’ll see it, as we were
far apart as those stars,
the ones we said were “so close”,
while meaning to collide
like histories, like covers
that were keeping us closed
to memories that hold on,
like muddied footprints,
of catastrophes
we kept backtracking
to keep drawing eyes back
to an epicenter,
where we began.
Modern Romanticism 