The North Star

You once knew every version of me

From when I had the buzzcut and one train ticket up North

To when I had nothing but

Did you ever stop waking up from that nightmare, and realize that I never left?

I’m still here at the Station where you called to me on the 18th of June

I’ll never leave and never have

Denying pleasure to save face

The moonlit motel in your Mothers’ Fresno State hoodie

Did your wings of fire descend into the blaze a la inferno incarnate

How did I lose you?

The sands of time slipped through my fingers

The life lost passed and went in four years 

None the wiser did I become as increasingly the tides crashed

Yet so, I let us fall apart at the seams as I watched through the cracks in the nights past as we falsely reconnect

A perversion of what existed before I fled for the fourth time

Stagnation rotted us to the core

The ring-bearers grew too old and few too many remained for any resurrection pretold

Had I married you, would you have stayed?

Would the prophesied tall tales of far and wide sent from above came to be

Your Grandfather’s farmhouse (on the West End of Sherman) now a home but not what we once envisioned 

The child you had and named after the waitress we met when my car broke down 

I never forgot

The brown eyes or hazel hair

The letter returned to sender

The smoke signals 

The prayers, The signs, The scripture