You Never Wrote Back

I wrote you a letter with my finger

on the fogged-over window of the car

as we drove from Santa Monica to Silver Lake

Drove right into the storm, hoping to speed through it

and burst into the sunshine on the other side

But it seemed to be traveling with us

and when you turned on the defogger

the words I’d written to you disappeared,

even though the glass was still cold, even though

our breath was still hot, and the rain

wrote its own letter on the windshield

in a dancing, splattery language

neither of us knew how to read

So we turned on the radio instead

and sang along

I wrote you a letter with my hands

across your back, up and down

your spine, your neck and shoulders,

tracing the letters slowly

but you still couldn’t guess them,

so I tried my fingernail, then a real nail,

then a tattoo gun, etching the words

in ink the same color as your skin

so even if you didn’t know what they said

you would never forget them

I wrote you a letter in water

to save you the trouble of reading it.
I wrote you a letter in ash

to save you the trouble of burning it.

I wrote you a letter in blood

on the inside of my skin

so you wouldn’t have to know

it ever existed

I wrote you a letter on a billboard, on a movie marquee,

on a sign in front of a suburban church,

on the side of a blimp. I hired a skywriter

to write you a letter in cloud against the California sky.

I wrote you a letter in a bowl of alphabet soup.

On a slip of paper inside a fortune cookie.

I wrote you a letter in Braille, in sign language,

in Morse code, in semaphore.

A wrote a letter in the form of crossword puzzle clues

but they were too hard for you to figure out.

I wrote a letter in scrimshaw on a walrus tusk,

in ones and zeros shot into the atmosphere

and reassembled on an illuminated screen,

punctuated by animated faces and hearts.

I wrote you a letter in paint on the shell of a tortoise.

He'll still be walking the Earth, trying to deliver it

after we’re both dead and gone.

I wrote you a letter and you told me

you prefer a postcard, that you really

only have time to look at the picture anyways