• You can recite the first sixteen digits of pi,
    but when someone asks
    if you still taste her peppermint gum,
    your cheeks go pale for a moment.

    You have spent a night
    figuring out how fast the train was going
    an hour after she left you,
    departing the station in a southwest direction,
    just as the dusk settled at 6:32 PM.
    Her face and your heart growing
    small in the distance,
    a howling speed that echoed
    down to the soles of your feet.

    If the distance between two people is divided
    by how much you want to apologize and multiplied by
    how you'll never have the right words to say how
    deeply terribly sorry
    you are,
    what kind of poem do you write her?
    What is the address of all those letters and messages
    and phone calls you started but never actually sent?
    How many dollars does it take (in gas mileage)
    before she takes you back again?
    What if you [A] show up at her B door
    and find that [C] she doesn't
    want you anymore?
    Answer in terms of your lips bleeding
    and your jaw hurting for love of her.

    How much of you is left? Answer in fractions,
    answer in the crescent moon of your fingernails
    digging into the soft of your palms, answer in
    how empty your whole body has gone.

    She was your everything.
    She was every atom and star and word that you have ever learned,
    all dancing in a harmony that made you
    believe in magic.

    What is the twelfth atom in the periodic table.
    What happened to tesla.
    What invention allowed for the internet.

    Will you get her back. Can you get her back.
    Prove: this time will be different.
    Prove: you will be there for her the way she deserves.
    Thesis: if you run hard enough, then when you show up
    you'll be too out of breath to say much
    and she'll be able to see by your bloody feet and
    the hurt in your eyes that
    ever since she's gone

    all else has died.