I left Tahoe blue.
Stupid self talk and
interstate love songs.
I remember begging the question of “why?”
Why did I do it?
Why did I drink myself under?
I whispered back,
“it’s because of a woman.”
It’s always because of a woman.
I remember the little things,
like how much hair was on my face.
The pink and yellow pills;
the different shades of depression.
They say the seasons in Reno
are more colorful than the neons of Vegas.
But the depression is like an old black and white film
in which I’m an actor
trying to play myself.
And who cares what “they say,” anyway?
It’s not like we were going to stay,
work, marry, and die
in the same depressing town we grew up in.
That would require a little bit of stability.
See, there I go again.
I slip, snowball, and smuggle in my sarcastic shit
like, “sTraNgE weather, aYe?”
waiting for you.
Scabs open and heal and reopen again
waiting for you.
I arm-wrestled the biggest and baddest trucker
at the Alamo Truck Stop in Sparks, Nevada
and won,
in front of everyone;
and he was easy to me
waiting for you.
But deep in my discovery;
I’ve found that you’re human–
all too human, too.
With enough time, space, and love
to settle into the sweetness of the soil;
long enough to fossilize this once-living-organism-of-ours into stone.
The evidence for our love
trapped below the gray hairs on my head,
I can go back in time, like an archaeologist,
making the most of the bits and pieces of the invisible landscape–
the fossil of the heart.
And now,
pulverized into the raw,
under a quiet little clock called Decay
which started ticking
from the moment that death occurred.
No longer blue,
but gray
as the hands tick away
until eventually,
even the clock of Decay runs out of time
waiting for you.
~
Poem by Ryan Anarchy
Artwork by Benedetto Cristofani
I wrote this while listening to:
* Bad Flower – Move Me
* Ben Howard – Black Flies
RYAN ANARCHY 