A Selection of Our Greatest Hits

I was a sheltered suburb small-town city boy;
you were a classic rock New York granola girl
(both of us caught in kind of a lonely world).

We made a playlist together
called Young Lust:
named after the song
and the feeling
of a rhythm in the flesh.

We listened to it so much
that we filled our Spotify Wrapped
in only four months:
the mother of all soundtracks for
the happiest days of our lives.

But for five years
after the thin ice,
I couldn’t listen
to any of those bands,

because the texture of their sound
was the temperature of your skin,
their voices the wavelength of your hair,
distortion the dark buzz
on the bricks in your walls
in kick-drum starlight,
your tone and volume pupils dilated past eleven
with goodbye-blue-sky haloes
like the edge of an eclipse—

Floyd is the creak in your bedframe,
Zeppelin the pulse in your floorboards;
Then Creedence and Clash,
Talking Heads and Heart,
Kinks and Cream.

Cut to me after the breakdown,
one of my turns pathetically asking you
not to fuck anyone else
to the same songs,

because when you listen to music together
your heartrates synchronize,
and when I thought of anyone else in that duet,
my ears wouldn’t stop ringing.

Don’t leave me now.

The disharmony between us
trying to be friends after the fact
was my fault: I rebounded too fast,
ahead of the beat, afraid of a rest,

unplugging an already broken heart
and filling what could have been comfortable
silence
with static.

I will never know how you forgave me
for all the fights we got in that fall,
all the fights that I started,
because I couldn’t believe
that both of us had moved on.

But we were just empty spaces,
neither comfortable nor numb,
and we didn’t know what to do
with the broken halves of our fishbowl.

We were a sheltered suburb small-town city boy
and a classic rock New York granola girl,
still in love for the leaving,
neither wanting nor knowing how to say

goodbye (cruel world,
maybe; but lonely is worse).