Love Poem # 17 – A Memory Of Something That Never Happened

The night happens without notice this time of year.
It seems like just hours ago
that it was sunny,
although it was cold.
The clouds weep grey black strings.
Sometimes, a break of blue.

Outside the curtained window
of our fifth floor room,
We are hiding in a hotel,
behind a deserted auto parts factory,
(once they made walnut dashboards here).
waiting for something to happen.
Not necessarily tragic, not yet anyway.
Not catastrophic.
Personal.
We drink, play cards and and drift into the seamless night
Our world is falling apart by inches.

Planes fly overhead.
They are heading east, heavily loaded for the nightly raids.

She will leave I think. She has to.
The life she has no longer works
and what I bring,
my cynical survival,
is not likely to fix that.
As if anything can fix or more poignantly,
stop, the coming storm.

We are all of us lost these days.

Honor has given way to survival she says.
She gets up from the soiled sheets
of our unmade bed, our first and only home.
And what’s wrong with that I ask.
Nothing she says, what else am I to do?
She pauses, knowing full well that honor is all that we have left to sell,
Without it she says, we will live but to what end.

We are all a little broken I think, I say to her.
Broken makes us pause,
broken is where the light comes from, she says.

We can leave tomorrow I say to her. Go to the country,
just like we said we would.

We can get away from all this.

No, she says after awhile, not we.

Photo Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz – All Rights Reserved

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