Miss Me

Is there a word for forever
The kind of forever you know won’t last,
And maybe you don’t KNOW know
But a niggling something pulls, pulls, pulls from somewhere deep
Like a word you’ve just lost like a balloon to the sun
A word for the waste
A word for threading your hand through your father’s curled arm
A word for walking the crumbling plank without a glance back
A word for loss upon loss
But is there a word for when the reminder hits
The lyric, the poem, the snippet
A word for the long-forgotten scent
A word for the facial expression
A word for the anchor you forget, the anchor you thought you’d discarded long ago, the anchor that drops unceremoniously into the still water and plunges you back into what you left behind, chain thrashing and clanging and dragging,
And you wonder why it couldn’t work,
And why you still pay the price