clues

i found you early this morning
or a few decades ago,
it’s hard to tell time
always waking up here
in this sun flooded room
where the adults left us long ago.

your face handsomely ill,
half-shaved and clever
smiling like someone who had
put all his money on the lottery
and lost, rejoicing in
the sharp razor blades of chance.

i found you in the desk next to me,
fingering the chewed gum stuck
somewhere between your sweating
palms and the questions you
had already answered thoroughly
before failing.

i found you strangling joyously
on the ocean’s shore
bound in seaweed
turning a sandy green with
the dreams i swam through as a child.

i found you still smiling somehow
in the shattered mirror since
used by a man prematurely
aged, who died forcing himself
into tiring attempts at innocent laughter.

we met each other under a splintering
staircase, loud stereo beats
pulsing down the sewer and smoke
of the blackest voodoo choking us.

only this time you didn’t smile.

neither did i.

it makes sense, then, that
i found you missing yesterday
on a poster blurred and torn
by the summer breeze, your
height and weight indeterminate
your face badly xeroxed