Leave a Mess

Leave the cigarettes unfinished when you go. Leave summer still
to happen and all the leaves gone red or yellow sealed for keeping

after you’re gone. Leave friends at dinners, holding places for you,
empty chairs that won’t be filled by talk or toasting in the quiet months

since you have gone. Leave the kitten set for scratching messages
into the skin, the wine still bottled, the doors blown open for visitors

and registries of cold. Leave love untold, the telephone still dead
and unaware that you have gone. Leave the wind in every ribcage,

beating code to say that you have gone. Leave airplanes ascending
altitudes and clocks to be reset when you have gone. Leave

skin underneath your fingernails for evidence of what has made you
go. Leave the mouth of every stranger filled with gossip at your

leaving, every tooth tuned to departure, every standing, sitting,
falling body well-tempered for goodbye. Leave everything and every-

one you’ve touched with fingerprints to be washed clean of upon
some future bath time or dusting. Leave the steady ironed outfits

swinging softly inside doorframes and the laundry set to spinning
in the washer, dryer, tornado season where it was when you had

gone. Leave the furniture upended, every book and dish
and conversation bloodied and chipping paint against the wall. Leave

handprints on your spouse’s cheeks and handprints in the pockets
of your favorite jeans when you are on the way out and going.

Leave words you’ve said not to spark a cinema or any attentive
undertaking in the guise of Where have you been? but leave an all-

around Hello for any potential admirer who might slip a note of praise
into your skull when other eyes have turned to go. Leave all mistakes

for reckoning in figures now that you have gone. Leave no voice to say
Gone, Gone Away, when you’re out-out but have not yet gone.