Muted, you're a solid dark eye that marks the world cold and strays. Take a tape player and catch the leaves in a steel-stringed net, they burn silhouettes onto your memory. You're loud and old and used-up like headlines in a newspaper. I remember you, I remember when you said you were sorry and cried so hard I felt your sorrow rattle through me. In the gutter, you left me a relentless storm of consciousness, battling your dreams into the freezing black water. Didn't I hold your hand once, and say, You're okay, You're okay, You're okay, so small, like a prayer under a shoe. I told you then, and you knew.

Ashes fell and covered your hair like snow, haloed your head with the arson you committed. Born again under the Sun, you roared forward, proclaimed this page written in some witch-cat's book. You melted like a flower into the foliage, I think you were always a child of the forest. Green dawned on your lips one day and you were in your place, under the flash of a camera with a half-smile. I chased and chased you, keep on running until my legs break, but you're far away, high up like a clever butterfly and I just can't reach. I send you love letters in your sleep asking you to come back to me someday, but I think you're lost in the music that your mind makes, tangled in the rocks and dirt and grass and all your mirth that maybe we're just separate, muse and poet, disconnected.