50. BARGAIN

Oh if I could have you back
I’d bargain all my ambitions
and conquests against your
soft mind-and-body empathy
beside me in my car.

When I die I think I’ll scream
and make a last failing grasp
toward all the selves I could have been.

Yet they, like you, never were –
and if they might have been,
Time, time inexorable
vanishes as unused codes
of past and could alike.

Day is the choice,
dusk the sentence,
night its execution.

I swear to you now,
before these witnesses—
Yearning, Melancholy, deep
Volcanic Grief, and also
a Love shamed by meaningless scribbles
and acts transformed into their own atrophy—
I would give all other futures
If I could only have you back again.