Sentences

We kick them out so we can
fill the silence with nonsense;
_____a friendship dwindled
_____into the vestige of a dream.

The hallway stretches ahead
once more like a phone call
lagging a world in between.

Letters scratched off cereal boxes;
a life crammed into
the distance of a scream.

Replay the rhyme
like a country expecting
like the waiting,
____recurring
__________recurring
_____recurring,
__________recurrin'.

Welcome the words back
still dusty from the rubble;
the ones that made it will do.

Those missing, have done their job;
they'll remain somewhere
in a sentence, in a thought.

Incomplete sentences are sentences,
too, in some languages
where the dead have names.

But for now, only hint at them--
you never knew them,
they never knew today.

Stick the alphabet, one after the other,
down the graves
where the soil is supple still.

One day a sentence will begin again
written with characters
they once knew.

They spelled their names
with all the voices of the earth
in a corner where the shadows never heave.

(originally posted on August 24, 2006)