Though it started with the woman
I fell in love with a few months ago,
who couldn't keep up,

I don't know that I blame her,
since with the way these emotions
flow right now,
I can't keep up either.

It'll be a beautiful thing,
they say,
when I get a chance
to take a breath
and see from something of a distance,

how stretching back
all the way
past the horizon,
there's a long line
of unmended hearts
half-buried in the road

ending with that little kid
crying in bed
because somehow he knew
whatever love is
he wasn't.

Second graders
don't have words
for any of this.

And 50 year old men
aren't much better,

at seeing the ego's lonely
place in the Universe,

watching the house of cards
crashing down,

sensing the coming change
that changes everything,

and knowing
how all the years
and all the words
and all the effort

to make right
the awful pain
of solitude's incompleteness
has come to the kind of nothing

that frees even jaded hearts
such as mine.