Only Broken Rules

 

Only Broken Rules

(“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not let it be afraid.” John 14:27)

It is time for us to go now,
we can talk along the way. The
walls are ready to implode now,
and firelight has nothing left to say.

I cannot wait to see you again,
sometime before my next life crisis.
The troubles might try to drag you down;
the demons fancy a tour of my garden
planted yesterday so yellow and carefully.

There are enough people to blame,
enough weekends to discover the schemes
of failures on the outside of the rooms we constructed
to protect our thin-shelled eggs of ideas.
What seems an onslaught was
just a summer rain last year.

It is time for us to go now,
we can walk up and down the streets. The
walls have tumbled, muddy sheetrock,
and the moonless night swirls like sludge from
a prairie oil derrick. Can we stand still while it,
glacial and black, fills every hole and crack?

I may never see you again,
it might be because of my last life crisis.
The troubles dragged us down as we estimated
the cost of a friendship like ours.
The demons took their seats to see whether
wildflowers and tulips could thrive in the same
garden plot.

I know who you blame, and I know who I suspect,
though none more guilty than myself. What if peace
is what we expect, clean air that thins the grimy night
and lets us dance again, walk the hills again, smoke cigars
and get uneven tans again?

It is time now; the walls are shambles. If you hear me
call your name,
meet me in the rubble. You remember the table and
golden chairs where we once ate sandwiches together?
The demons have all gone home, the troubles have expired,
only our memories keep us apart,
only broken rules can mend us again.