SEVENTEEN

With sufficient sweat
and intuition, two people
can reach the point
where one hears the other say
"I feel like an E-flat"
and knows he's not entirely upset
that his heart has just been broken.
Friendship like this is something woven
from worn out t-shirts shredded to strips,
an act recorded to play back
over and over on the wheels of memory
though behind each carefully preserved phrase
lurk a hundred scrambled dawns
spit out like grapefruit seeds
by slack-jawed time, and the groves
grow thick between them.
What happens to the hours of practice put in
to a friendship that's past its final run?