Couldn't Call It Unexpected #6

The biggest decisions are the easiest ones
Feel love in the middle stages of sleep
Shun sleep in the later stages of grief
Would I run
Far from the crowds of kids and their painted-on eyelids?
Sure I would run, who wouldn't? Who couldn't
Believe in something bigger than the tiny steps taken?

In the aisles of the big rooms on Bellflower Boulevard
He checked the texts from the sexy something sweet
He turned the corners carefully
Shunning the endcaps like cadavers
Don't want to deal with the badgers
No need for injuries with so little time to wait

In the spring of nineteen-ninety-zero
A tap on the shoulder leads to a loaded question
She keeps him guessing
For the rest of the semester
And Orange County skies look like blue-black bibles of bled-dry thought bubbles

The man in glasses - the little brother - wrote a history
With place names and fake names
Choruses and crushed corduroy
Faded labels in the neon commercial light
She might not have been part of this particular story
But her man without glasses read all these books
He liked the lines with lots of punctuation
Semi-colons unexpectedly launching exclamations
Now he's ready for his next big move
His last big move though there may be little ones left

He wishes he could have gone into her bedroom
The one in the old house but he made sure she made it in okay
While she made sure he had the right directions to the freeway
Still, he went the wrong way
Then they talked about the birthday

It's nice nice
The look in her living eyes
He was so tired that first night
But he got through it by narrating
The best tales, the ones he wrote himself
As he wrote himself into corners of laboratories
And she smiled like electricity itself

The easiest decisions are the biggest ones
Like yes he'll go to his third favorite city
With you you you

It was the summer she came back and he knew it
It was the summer she put the pieces together
It was the summer he discovered gummy bears
Softer than the hard soft rock swimming in his earbuds
But not as soft as Sunday night kisses on a subdivision street

August 22, 2009