The Coda

The pen is dragging through the heat.

My thumb is locked, a dull defeat.

I saw her face between the stacks,

the ghost of all my old defects.

She drew a circle, thick and red,

to mark the notes I left unsaid.

"Your hands are heavy, blunt and slow,"

she told the keys I tried to know.

The diagram is just a smear,

a quiet map of twenty years.

The music stopped before it started,

left me stiff and hollow-hearted.