these once beautiful songs that were held within you & your lover’s heart together forever as if such an impossibility was possible, now sing backwards at you from the stereo in your car
when she gets home after working a ten hour shift he is sitting in a chair in the living room waiting for her--- on one hand he wears a white glove it is still clean, and he smiles at her,
a balloon half-filled with helium hovers five inches or so below the ceiling of the cafeteria a few feet away from the time clock & on a table near the balloon,
the patient, a younger man, walks in & sits down the doctor, an older man, sits in his chair with yellow legal pad in hand as he stumbles through what happened last week,