thirty four cigarettes

Thirty four cigarettes, spilt
on the floor by your cat, you
yelled at him as you cleaned up the mess.

Four hundred quiet late-night knocks on
the door before backrubs on the floor,
voices and kisses behind the coffee table,
hidden from your sleeping roomate.

Fifty-five minutes of songs played with
closed eyes and you in the back of my mind,
the sound drowning in the back of a crowded bar.

Five hundred bowls of weed and a
few dozen beers shared with you,
fifteen years old, holding hands and
finally feeling okay.

Eighty-eight piano keys you never heard
me play, but you said I must be pretty
good, and you'd teach me to drive a manual car
if I taught you Billy Joel.

A thousand and three missed phone calls and
cancelled plans and the
weights lifted from my feet as I walked
and listened to six new messages.

Thirty seconds of emanated light
from a kiss too spiritual and brilliant
to be reflected in all the paintings
from your meditation books.

Fifteen minutes to your apartment and
a four-song mix tape and
silence enough to take inventory of
our love, seventeen years old with a
heavy hard-beating heart
and two years of you
and a few lies
and lying silently asleep
and two empty boxes of cigarettes,
one awful secret,
and one dying beautiful love that
once was
and might have really been.