Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them
indeed rivals the workings of his heart? – Pablo Casals
A mistaken phone call resting on emphatic refrain,
the failure of words balancing themselves in the mouth of a lover.
The ruined words that drape a man dying, unconscious
in the hands of his child.
Sunday morning falling between bed sheets of precarious strangers
that cling asleep to their next words.
A love letter lost to time – the tussle of words in lips broken up into longhand,
fragments of I love you signed by an imperfect spouse forgotten in war.
Words caught in the mesh set in the throat, oxidized in red
strips, that you have trouble pronouncing to the one lodged in your stare.
That conversation only happens when drunk, the meaning hinged on the neck
of a bottle, truth at its end, the feel in its sugars, and a loss feigned
on a blackout caught in love.