Alone

The just-cut grass on the churchyard lawn,

invited us to linger, to talk about nothing.

So we sat in the sun while the cars drove by,

watching the birds pick through the clippings.

Lost in the day, we forgot about time.

Then you jumped up and ran and I didn't know why.

I didn't know what waited on you at home,

the fear you lived with.  

Your brother taught us important things like

how to steal squirtguns shoved down the front of our pants at the dime store.

A man with a badge grabbed you, so I ran.

We were seven years old.

They wanted to be near you, 

to know you as I did,

and when they saw us together,

maybe they would think I was like you.

Our moms paid the school for the overhead projector

that we broke when we fought in the fourth grade.

We were too young to know what we meant,

when we didn't talk for a month.

You were already gone,

when I thought to try.

We smelled each others shoes and you laughed when you smelled mine.

Years later, I smelled my own shoes, and I tried to laugh like you.  

Now, that memory fades like a solders story from the war before the last one. 

In a few days, or a few years, it will be gone forever.

Yet I see your face in stale-gray silhouette,

all the colors faded like a bugle singing taps at sunset.

You are barely a whisper now,

and you haven't told me a secret these forty years.

Everybody met at the same church where we sat those years past.

They lied to each other with made up stories about what you had said,

just the other day.

Then, no shit, your mom turned and looked at me,

she thought I was you, 

and she called me your name.  

She cried and asked me to visit her, to sit in her kitchen chair like I used to.  

Like you used to.

Years gone and now its just me,

and I wonder where you are.

It wasn't supposed to work out this way,

I wasn't meant to be alone.

I hope you are back in that churchyard, 

forever watching the birds picking over the clippings.