Coffee House Get-Together With An Ex
We meet in a coffee house
after ten years apart.
In our conversation,
those ten years
and our two together
jostle for attention.
You’ve met someone.
You’ve settled down.
But you still love Hendrix.
And the beach remains
your Mother Earth.
Meanwhile, I’ve remarried.
No kids so no need to bore
you with their details.
We have our own home.
Your meager apartment gets a complex
so I stay away from how many rooms,
the size of our backyard.
We don’t touch upon
why it didn’t work.
We just extract moments
from when it was working,
pretend that was all of it.
And the intervening times
catch a break.
No imagining what it
would be like if we had shared them.
Despite the laughs,
an occasional tear,
those ten years remain intact.
You look older,
slightly wiser.
I’ve some gray
to give my heartbeat pause.
I’ve enjoyed this time together.
If I could turn back the clock,
it’d be the one on the wall.
Beyond The Wish List
The last year was murder.
Every night, another argument,
two heads going at it,
two hearts begging for mercy.
Weary, one of us would walk,
one drive, at a good pace
in opposite direction,
until sleep hauled us back
to be temporarily communal.
By day at least, we kept
ourselves at arm’s length.
I worked the factory
with radio at full blast,
one heavy metal
in deafening conflict with another.
You tended a second hand book store,
selling rough copies of
Dos Passos and Fitzgerald
between sipping lattes
from the coffee house next door.
Without the other around,
we could work on strengthening our cause.
I saved one photograph from the dumpster,
two of us on a beach,
me rubbing oil into your back.
Now my fingers are on the east coast,
your shoulder blades keep to the west.
But just the other day,
I saw someone who looked like you.
I thought that was your job.
And your yearly email,
I read at least three times.
I give you an 8 out of 10 for happiness.
My mark is roughly 7.
To be honest,
without lawyers and wedged apart
by flyover country,
we’re actually quite a couple.
Not that I wish us back together.
But there’s other wishes where that came from.
by John Grey
