Sad Songs
Felt like, the future was dead, as was the past.
Felt like, no job could be desirable.
Spent three hours in line to cast a ballot for the dead present.
Van says they don’t feel a spiritual sense in pop music,
how everyone just vibes along, not listening to the suffering
I had lived a whole year, had been here, and then gone. Not, and then true.
I couldn’t end the disclaimer, the situation of staring open a truth.
I ate a sandwich that sat in my car for two days.
I didn’t care that much.
I got too drunk with my partner’s partner.
We slugged sour beer after sour beer.
My old love like a gold chain.
I wake and desire to touch a beloved, gently spooned.
They are soft, with soft, gold hair.
My former lover is soft, with soft hair that’s not so gold.
This could be a kind of texture study.
Beloved with firm thigh.
Beloved with gorgeous, dramatic black eyelashes.
After two hours in the car, they asked me to turn on a less sad song,
but I couldn’t think of any. Not even one.
Pleasure of a sad, sad song.
Pleasure of belting out pop music in a crowd with friends,
drunk as the lights come up,
me in a velvet miniskirt that’s too tight
and flat, black boots,
Steffan and me at the edge watching Sam flit around the room.
Sadness was underneath everything, every grim rug.
That bar closed forever, now,
with its twinkling lights and fake flowers.
A little kick of nothing to return to, only thing left to swim ahead.
In the future, I will sit in a room with my friends.
The room will be pink.
I will listen while my friends talk, read poems, laugh.
This isn’t, finally, a death song, a note to be left, but a real wish.
I didn't need to be the life of the party.
Wanted a gentle lurking present, to hear
a ribbon of laughter loop through the room.
I wanted everyone to have more than just an okay job,
more than a pink room, but I wanted pink rooms, too.
I wanted bread. I wanted to tuck a rose behind
the ear of a beautiful woman.
I wanted to find a way to be soft, to pin fabric
to a jacket and all afternoon stitch it together in lacy loops.
I wanted no suffering inside the songs, though I wanted sadness,
I wanted the sadness of rare, golden afternoons.
The way a bird can be sad, singing its little song in the woods.
The way a tree can be sad, dropping its red leaves.
I wanted to touch my friends’ faces as they wept.
I wanted to rest my head on Sam’s shoulder, something
I almost never did, when I could.
Sam’s hair is long now, piled in a loose bun.
We discuss which of us is most 19th century.
Gabby, for love of solitude, me, for being in the woods,
Sam for love of beauty and mood.
Those we love will still die.
The ocean will still suggest a vast grief.
There will be big waves of feeling.
One job might be to cup sand under people’s heads.
Another would be tending flowers, which are beautiful and important.
Another, looking after bees.
Someone could have the job of bending metal into hoops.
Someone, pointing out carrot flowers in a field of pumpkins, white starry bursts.
The future didn’t have to look like anything.
I wouldn’t have to give up my serious face, my stony look.
The poems could arrive like golden stars, or not at all.
Someone somewhere will sing a song and someone else will sing along.
I do know what I am doing when I tell you about the flowers that grow in the graves,
as you know what you are doing when you tell me
you laid down in the snow in the sweetgrass and it felt soft and warm and safe.
This is love, I think, a silvery web over everything.
This is love, I think, a pink river that takes nothing with it when it goes.
Stephanie Cawley
Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. She is the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions) and the chapbook A Wilderness (Gazing Grain Press). Her poems and other writing appear in DIAGRAM, The Fanzine, TYPO, and Protean, among other places. Her website is stephaniecawley.com.