There were all of these things to be said

There were all of these things to be said
but no means to say them, no words.
I guess the things were feelings, things
that were felt, the way you might run your fingers
over leather or some other fine material
if you were a person who actually cared
about fine materials, which I am not
which is why the best I could come up with
was leather, though I did a second later
think of cashmere, but I instantly rejected
that because it made me think of Seinfeld
in the episode where the office cleaning lady
falls for George and anyway cashmere isn't
how I roll, although I did own a cashmere blazer
when I was in high school, we got it on sale
at Marshalls, which I know now is a discount store
for items which if they were books would be
remainders, at least I think that's how it works,
and so my mother and I we bought that gray
blazer there just before my sophomore year
of high school, I know it was then because
I remember one time in home room I made
the blazer dance-like to my off-key humming
rendition of Led Zeppelin's “Kashmir” which
I then medleyed into Scatterbrains's “Don't Call Me
Dude,” which was a hit with Rich and, later,
Erik and Dan, which was everybody in our class
who would get the Scatterbrain reference except
for Jerry who was always hidden under his hair
and pretty humorless at least until he got a few
beers in himself, but I wouldn't know that until
the end of the year and this was the start of the year
and I didn't mean to go off on a tangent, in fact
I forget what I was getting at originally, it's like
that cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago,
on a dusty old west road these two cowboys
are walking away from each other, hands on
their six-shooters, the classic Hollywood
showdown, but the one in the foreground has
a puzzled look on his face and a thought bubble
over his head which reads, “Damn if I didn't start
walking in this direction for a reason . . .”
which is exactly my point, I knew where I was going
but now I don't, though I remember now
where I was then, when I didn't have the words
to get to where I wanted to go, wherever that was.