It breaks you

To see your life
Scrawled out in wet ink
In the referreed journals
Of someone else's trophy case.

To see her well-tended garden
of poems neatly arranged by year
published, soil you composted
and left fallow for anyone else to love.

To listen to the thump of
Validating bass notes from her
low-slung guitar she learned to
strum because she wanted to, so she did
And practice didn't make perfect but it made something.

it breaks you to know you're nothing
because you're lazy, and because
law & order used you,
and because you stopped and scolded the tumbleweed
When she let it blow on through.