Ode to The Doors

I woke with the night in my mouth

and the taste of rain

where no rain had fallen.

Somewhere,

a radio was confessing

to an empty room.

The city had gone blue at the edges.

Streetlights burned like small religions.

Every window held a life

I would never know.

I walked anyway.

Past the bars

where beautiful people practiced disappearing,

past the churches with their doors locked,

past a woman smoking beneath a dead motel sign

as if she had been waiting there

since the beginning of time.

She said,

You're late.

I said,

For what?

She laughed.

That was the first answer.

The moon hung low and obscene,

too large for the sky,

dragging the ocean behind it.

I thought of everyone I had loved.

How we enter each other

like abandoned houses.

How we leave lights burning

in rooms we will never return to.

How sometimes a person is not a person

but a door,

and sometimes

you spend your whole life

standing on one side of it.

By morning

the road had turned silver.

The woman was gone.

The city was waking.

And there,

at the edge of everything I knew,

was the terrible little secret:

the door had never been locked.

The door had never even been closed.

I had only been afraid

of what I might become

once I walked through.