Albert K. Ashes-Bury’s the Hardest; The Hardest

Been burnt. Big words all gone.
That was it, I think. You were in my toddler dreams, I swear.

“I dropped it all for us”: this is the lowest conversation.
I couldn’t quite believe how safe and chilling it was.
Dumb, dumb vocabulary; discovering music too old.
Such outliers, we were, with good lies.

They sound standardised, these antiquated narratives.
But parents and our lovers: what else is there?
And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and I’d like to remember
anything else about time.

No. Don’t say, “I never enjoyed it,” again, as I think we filled each other
perfectly, and I can’t quite forgive how equal it felt and tasted.
Now I watch someone else die on screen, and it is us, and it is
so serious—we made sense of everything—all I’d
ever doubted—all they wrote about it.

I’m too young, too: I shouldn’t be this sick and full on…
…I can never quite say it…
Barely breathing; thinking of you smiling
through the bars. No one—in all the stories—can have ours.

I don’t care now—I don’t care. I’ll die
all over again I promise. And you know, they can change
the narrative as we do. Look at him here: he’ll consider
anything.
We won’t have to try. It can just happen for us
with silly tries.

And I won’t finish the sentence—I won’t—I won’t—
I-
I can’-
I jus-
I won’-

That was really it, I think. The hardest; the hardest;
don’t keep adding to it.
I suppose some don’t even get this: long drives; each note;
every movement. Then a fire.

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