Broken Record

If music is love
Your life is the record
That started off clean
And ended up scratched

By someone’s careless handling
One groove goes so deep that
You skip back to it over and over
And over again

As if you will find yourself
In the empty well,
In the narrow scab of space
They carved away from you.

You were played the same way
For so very long
That the dark and deepened rut
Is now your go-to-track

Even as the needle moves
And something new
Is calling you home
You can’t hear the sound

(You can’t be found)

When you fall into the dark
All music stops
And in that static, bitter slit
Nothing can live.

Love can’t live
In the scrape of despair.
Love is drowned in the sound
Of the screech and the grind.

And when you skip to the place
I cannot follow,
You leave me behind
With just echoes of you

One verse so lovely
I return to it over and over and
Over again,
Making my own deep and tortured wound

(Another old, familiar tune).

My darling,
You must go where piano notes can climb like the stars
And I must go where cellos swell my heart to the sky
Because love waits in the tops of the trees
where the wind blows
in infinite iteration;
Whole soundtracks we’ve never heard or imagined.

Are there ways to fix
A broken record?
Surely, my tears cannot do it.

I only know that
Love is not a war
That is won in useless trenches —
And I cannot live there, anymore.

Love is the music.
And as for the record we must simply learn to play —
Each on our own,
Each in our own way.