Ocean Vuong - Always & Forever lyrics

Open this when you need me most, he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped in duct tape, beneath my bed. His thumb, still damp from the shudder between mother's thighs, kept circling the mole above my brow. The devil's eye blazed between his teeth Or was he lighting a joint? It doesn't matter. Tonight I wake and mistake the bathwater wrung from mother's hair for his voice. I open the shoe box dusted with seven winters & here, sunk in folds of yellowed news -paper, lies the Colt .45 -- silent & heavy as an amputated hand. I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning. That if I looked through it, I would see the end of this sentence. Or maybe just a man kneeling at the boy's bed, his grey overalls reeking of gasoline & cigarettes. Maybe the day will close without the page turning as he wraps his arms around the boy's milk-blue shoulders. The boy pretending to be asleep as his father's clutch tightens. The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten around a bullet to make it speak.