I had it in the car—assembled, loaded, warm inside my mouth
from the rehearsal, the whole architecture going south
to north without a hedge or an apology or the managed version—
I had the actual sentence with the actual immersion
of the self behind it, the honest weight of it intact,
the thing that’s been accumulating since the cracked
and broken night this started, every word in order,
every syllable accounted for, right up to the border
of the door I crossed into the house and lost the thread.
The thing I was going to say—
it lived in the car and died on the way
across the threshold where the air is different, where the actual
real space of the room collapses the theoretical.
The thing I was going to say, I had it clear.
I crossed the door and said the other thing. It’s here,
the manageable, the bandaged, the controlled—
the thing I was going to say. Going cold.
This runs on such a schedule now I’ve mapped the falling:
the thing forms in the motion, in the calling
dark of transit where no one’s listening but the road,
then dissolves on contact with arrival—the full load
of the honest replaced at the threshold by the cleaned-
up, presentable, undemanding—the demeaned
version of the feeling, processed down to something
that requires nothing from the room, that costs nothing,
that asks nothing and receives nothing in return.
What I meant is still out past the last turn.
The thing I was going to say—it’s in the car.
It’s on the overpass somewhere, it’s still traveling far
past the exit I let go without a turn—
the thing I was going to say. I’ll learn
eventually to carry it all the way inside.
Not tonight. I said the other thing. I lied
with something technically true—I said fine.
The thing I was going to say is Still mine.
I was gonna say
I almost said goodbye