Sad Songs

I want to run her words through a carwash, they are not dirty, just stale, the way a classic corvette needs a rinse occasionally, but never a re-paint. Dinner together in a roadhouse, the nasal song of a country boy trapped in a ball-breaking melody. I can’t hear her words, she can’t hear mine…finally we’re communicating. An owl in a hollow tree can hear the whole dark forest. I imagine I am roosting in her throat, listening, not to her mind or mine, but Brailing my way around. In those vocal folds, a little girl is weeping. a mother belittles and scolds. The server comes around. “How you’ll doing.” She and the waitress look to me, but I am still in the hollow of her throat a space now witnessing my own doleful litany of sad songs.