How Do You Say Goodbye

How do you say goodbye
to the friend who won't let you pass
through her blossoming embrace:
warm as fire, yet cold as morning dew?

I can still taste the words in my
mouth--slippery and wet, lacking
substance. I bite my tongue
and say nothing at all.

Oh god, it seems like a never-
ending turn around table lining
the walls of this place. A thousand words
to speak in the quite space of a moment.

Perhaps the crystals reflecting your
eyes (the same who watched while I
became) can tell you how much I feel, because
words are short, like commas who breathe.

The grandfather's heart beats and
ticks away this last and thundering and
silent moment with you. Your hands remind
me of our melody we once played. How did it go?

Dum dum la de dum and a nickel for
the flutes. Remember our first duet and how
our hearts were the timpanies and our breath
sang alto while your eyes danced in the strings?

I remember. You sat across from notre maestro and
I pizz'd and your smile burned brighter than
Handel's Hallelujah. What was music
prior to you?

As we stand, shoulder to shoulder, I come
to the realization that you were my song
I came here to sing. Thank you for teaching
me how. I think maybe now, I can speak.

You wait, and I clasp our duet between my
unrelenting fists. My tongue itches and my teeth ache
and you wait. I stutter, a brief incantation of some
unfinished melody.

"Goodbye. Goodbye." The words are bitter and foreign;
they taste worse than my silence. As a scratch my somewhat
idiotically sized vocaublary for something better apt, you hush
my lips and finish,

"I know."