new

tcafe

you'd always been an
open book with
endless chapters
( of some sort );
yellow-stained pages smelling heavily
of Camel Lights and coffee grinds;
the war used to be a
lifelong- fascination,
a box with tightly held secrets
that were undisposed;

( at night I would wonder where you kept
all your dust-covered fears )


your jokes now,
too bland, too
trivial,
too scattered --
I wait in my hopes that
it's not just the years,
falling by and counting up;
your quiet moments are filled with
smoke, and small, unprepared meals --

( i am sorry, for not having been enough )