Who is there to hold you kindly, when the world tries to tear you apart? Out, out, out, your mind screamed from its fog, before the morning marine layer even had a chance to blow past our campus. Words came out mouths and glasses were filled/refilled they say, but I only paid attention to the rumbles of the breathing, vibrating through the massive, right tusk I laid my head against, as I ask: Are you resigned to the futility of failing to relax between shifts like my frazzled French braided friend beside me, smirking as the freshly tapped pale ales pass from her hands to folks encircled with Pretty Lights playing overhead? What shows have you seen? Which stage lights have passed over that childhood scar from the pit bull on your left and the fence on your right?Whose arms center you tightly at packed festivals, whose voice fills you up and fills up the car rides to concerts? I remember when they told me you jumped out of your father’s truck while he drove.

My friend and some customers are sharing beer-tender memes and shooting the shit, and they would tell you that I was, I suppose. The trunk twists softly, I feel its leathery skin, and thousands of whiskery vibraissie scan my temples as I release seven words that hang on my heart heavier than the 7-ton creature behind me. The trunk lets out a hot, woeful snort at the word boyfriend and my mind, my heart, since September and all the more in that moment, is pressed over there, wherever you might beīecause I don’t know…The trunk coils kindly …where you are…It coils tighter, I can feel the hundreds of muscle ridges pressing along the lines of my clavicle… I don’t know if you are still…Here…With us. She washes dishes behind the counter and chides about moving a new mattress in with her boyfriend who thinks he can do it all, and the folks around me chuckle and grin but I do my best to shrug the weight of it from me, but I hear it’s somber, patient bellowed breathĪs my crossed-legged friend and I both sip from our pre-shift pints, We stare at our phones for a while, and the bellows seem almost gone. Sniffling nose, French braids just a little frazzled, mainly the mid left of the twins, Neck crooked down over a phone knook’d away in her lap, as she’s sitting on the barstool, crossed-legged, like the line from a Jason Isbell song, “Elephant”, that doesn’t need to be heard more than once, unless songs with E Minor hammer-ons, men who bang women before cancer takes the last shot and the indignity of death is your kind of driving vibe.Ī question as thick and as gentle as a trunk lays on my shoulder, again: What music do you listen to these days, so many years later? You were so young, the world has grown so ol… Is set free of dimensions then intuned with the way The compass explodes and the earthly mind That surrounds Incomprehensible! our eternal selfs To Think Deeply About Where You Come From The cosmic within and without YOU MIGHT WANT

Cadence at union station denver