This was where we made plans
to get onto that roof,
and get downright silly about what people
might doing in all the yellow chapters
that make up the epic novels of brick or steel monuments
to aging gracefully and sadly.

Those monuments couldn’t skip town with two hundred bucks.
They couldn’t lie about their eighteenth year
to someone who was probably doing the same thing.

They were very reliable.
They always let someone get to the top,
look out with deceiving eyes,
and pretend free will fixes everything.

Reliable continues to be a tradition around here.
Dependable remained constant after you moved to Vegas.

This was where we held hands,
told the Midwest hurricane to go around us,
and worked together to be selfish enough
to get in the way of bike messengers, serial killers,
and people who can quietly relive their romantic childhoods
through graffiti.

I did most of the actual laughing.
I seem to remember you nodded a lot.
Let your eyes tell anyone who might be looking
for a universe of details in some strangers
that you were as beautiful right there
as your spiritual ancestor had been in the silent film era.

We imagined thousands of weird, violent birds
wrecking havoc on the first floor. I wasn’t smart enough
to know about species, neither were you,
so all we’d get out of it would be
a scene of bright, dazzling carnage.

This was where the night got away from us,
and where we both realized a shared bad habit
for building dangerous museums and curiosity exhibits
out of things that lived, died, and then calmly stepped aside
to make way for other boring buildings.

We put a home for agoraphobic singles on the second floor.
Thousands and thousands of discarded science fair projects on three.
Music content to melt before it could pass through the windows on four.
Writers who kept finding movies to watch online were on the fifth floor.
Christians who envied the bottom five for being sinners sprawled all over six.
Yard sale run by someone who saw the world as an endless California suburb at seven.

We never could agree on eight, nine, and ten,
and I can’t say now if I liked your ideas more or not.

When we went inside to get to the roof,
we moved too quickly to ever be disappointed.

05/15/2013

Posted on 05/16/2013
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