Challenging Poetry

a best friend

while we were apart,
I thought it'd take ten
thousand hours to tell you

things—important things
and unimportant things and
silly things and things

that I noticed and turned
to tell you about, only you
weren't there, and so they piled

up in my head like
the songs of crickets
and the murmur of brooks—

a background noise of things
you needed to hear,
and I needed to tell you

and then we came together,
easily, in the middle of some old
conversation, and all those

things fluttered away,
and we settled into
our silence.

April 18—Sounds…