And maybe the hole where my button was once sown on
Will always be the outcast
And maybe the gap where her teeth once were,
The place where her tongue pokes through
Is missing the tooth
That now lives under her pillow

Burn me a CD of your exhalations
And watch as they slip through the hole in the middle
And I’ ll miss every breath you take
Because all I can pay attention to
Is your words ruffling my dyed brown hair
As your smile finds my fluttering eyelids

And maybe the fragment of sunshine living in your hair is thriving
And maybe it’s just a piece of the emotion
I am trying to portray to you
In a mess of trembling fingers
Tucking hair behind a blushing ear
And bitten, blood-red lips

The gaps in the floorboards on my windblown deck
They try to catch my toes in their missing pieces
Try to trip me in their empty nooks and crannies
Watch me fall onto the splintering ground
And break my brave wrists
So I can no longer hold on to you

The other day I found a navy blue button
In a gap between my wall and bookshelf
Where last year I had bent down to plug in a CD player
To listen to your every exhalation, but no sound came out
And I was left with nothing but an empty hole in a sweater
And no buttons to put it back together