That Annoying Piano riff that opens
that annoying Coldplay song
is running over and over within me.

I just want it to stop
so instead I can hear
one strong memory
of a living river
I’m not close to
anymore:

Rio Grande
between Santa Fe and Taos;
white water
by the road

where I pulled over thirty years ago
to sit and listen
straining to hear the wind over
ghostly penitente crosses
that might stand
lonely out there still
somewhere on land no one
can get to now because we’ve 
forgotten the way there 
in the cloud of clatter
where we are forced to live.

The lights went out long ago
in the lodges of the penitentes,
and their voices have been
drowned in
noise:

in my head,
that annoying piano riff;

down the street,
the Sunday morning mower
cutting a ridiculous lawn
down to community-approved size;

on a neighbor’s radio,
the allegedly
newsworthy voices
of the insistent dumb;

and in my head,
louder than all the rest,
roaring sorrow and 
invincible ticking down
to a near certainty that
I will never return to
that notch in the side
of the road. 

Some things, I know, 
cannot be saved;

but for there to be
no compensation
for such loss?

Like that piano riff:
ubiquitous; an earworm;
nearly unbearable.