it is gone
and i cannot even
call you about it,
call to check
if you’d also heard the news,
if you’d also walked by
the empty walls
and upturned furniture
the rusted door
that once stood open
the murals of the Bay painted over,
once painted high and wrapping around
us and the bands that played
enveloped in walls of sound
of brass and fiddle and piano
and guitars and double the drums
and your whiskey ginger and my gimlet
dripping condensation and cup rings
ghosts of patrons over the decades
and mugs of hot ciders in rainy winter
we would steam up the windows
with our collective warmth and breaths
bundle up in our coats and walk home.
those days are gone
and I can’t even
call you to cry about it,
call you to say
do you remember…
call you to see
if we’d really lived those days
and those nights out together
call you to wonder
what did it feel like
to be so in love with each other
and how can that all
just poof! and go away,
how can it just sit empty
and abandoned and forgotten
and waiting, for what?
call and ask
did it all really happen
and will it feel the same again
or will we always be comparing
to past loves and past lives
and past jazz bars once alive
these homes we find in someone
or somewhere with others,
where does all that love go?
when all art is gone
so is the sound.
how do I find
yet again
that sense of home?
