a slow ray of light
creeps up
behind your neck
infects your lungs and
rattles our core like a
pearl in a glass vase
your chest
swells beats faster
with each
ensuing revolution
of your legs as you run
to the mountaintop
I have often wondered how I would
get to you,
by star-chain or knotted rope or
spotted line of dead bodies
lying on the ground--
How would I do it if I were to do it?
(-evolution)
When it's five in the morning and I'm
combing my hair
and there's no one in the bed
that means something
to me.
This is how it all began--
quiet
crepuscule
hazy one morning as the
first strands of
television
(-vision)
But no one else here writes poetry or
thinks of you; no one else here
understands.
The end is distant as the dust in Africa,
God's love as distant as a juniper on Saturn;
On this night when the air is tangled in gnats
and moths and fireflies, I think of your words,
If you can't see me, I can't see you
You come at four and I wake at five;
"It is time," you say. I am tired and dreamy
and slightly in love.
There is no one in the bed and you say,
"The beginning of something great is near,
near like the little hairs on the back of your neck
like the Earth God gave you, like His love..."
Did I catch you in the flashes?
Flash black, scourge scoured drenched in yellow, the slipping wet
sea covers like a cloak of
dying amethyst, coal-dark like bleeding metaphors I shot holes through.
I don't believe in wishes. I'm not afraid of anything, only diamond, hard
as nothing, cool as blue,
sharp like a hand-smack-clap against my face;
Nothing is like wet hair, like my dyed wet hair after a bath where I didn't try to keep it dry.
Panthers are crawling. Panthers in the tangle of leaves and spiders, in the
jungle where fires roam
and silhouettes follow their war paths, dotted lines...
"Nothing is like it--" high-pitched tapping on a drum.
I miss the quiet moments we collided with,
The ones we climbed into with wide-spread fingers and
Pried open like sticky bubbles made of pink and blue glue--
(I am the pink, you are the blue...)
Together we glisten like glass beads
Together we are shining, changing sun spots,
Morphing on the hot surface of our romance
As our plastic wings burn--
(The closer I get to you...)
Together we fold this springtime madness into a
Fortune teller and open it to reveal
Secrets we never saw coming--the kissing in the rain,
Breaking into locked buildings,
Lying in the grass filled with white tulips, the cold, wet petals tickling
our necks;
We kissed with our eyes half-open, as if we were drugged,
High on infatuation; high on the possibility of a sugar-filled,
Breath-snatching, cartwheel-down-the-street type love; and
Sleepy, really very sleepy with the dream that the
Sun would soon rise.