the last poet standing.

i chased the sunset today
and i remembered the days when we would chase it together
and it was you and me and me and you,
watching the sun cut itself open and bleed
across the sky and sink down below the shark teeth of the horizon.

sometimes that melody of ours builds up inside of me that i just scream it outloud,

i turn it around and inside out and updside down and

i put words backwards and throw one up and three to the right.

i whisper it to the quiet of your memories that i squeeze from myself

and follow it across to the ghost of your shadows 

on the brick walls that memorized our figures in the red stone on the night you knew you loved me.

the harmony of your heart still echos in the hollow of my ear,
vibrating in my vertebrae and fitting tightly in the gaps between my rib cage where
empty spaces now ache for the heat of your hands and long for
the way the ridges of your spine rose into the spaces between my fingers like
a well worn trail in the smoldering deep of the forest that only you
and i know about.

i'm screaming that melody for you to hear as i drive down the hill that
we used to drive every night with the windows down and my feet hanging out the left side.
you always went to fast and the brakes always held us
from meeting the glass but even if they didn't,
we would have made it through the crash, with our hands
woven together, carried away in the chords
of that song you used to sing to me
as i feel asleep.

sometimes...
sometimes i sit by myself at the top of that hill and i put
the car in park because i don't want the brakes to go out on me without you and
I reach out and cut the sun with my dry fingertips and watch it bleed across the sky,
hoping that it will leave you a trail of red to follow
and i turn our words upside down and inside out and turn them
over and over and over again.

but the melody stays the same
and i send it to the bleeding sun and watch the notes engrave themselves in the wisps of
the sky and i watch the saw teeth swallow the last of the light whole and i
hope where ever you are, that the sun will stain your skin with those notes,
repeating them back to you and etching them
into the ridge of your back bone where my fingers are supposed to be, drumming out the rhythm
for you to repeat back to me against my rib cage
reminding you of where home is.

and until you come back to the top of the hill, i will
continue to cut that sun open every night and turn our words on top of their selves
and hum that melody that holds me together while the spaces of my body where you belong are vacant,
waiting for your harmony to fill them up,
waiting for you to come home.