We settled on a stale breeze,
Bare trees,
Weak knees,
With the breath of the seas coating our eyes,
Now sunk in cracked and cold replies,
Clenching the edge of each surprise,
Which wouldn’t console a child,
After all the trouble riled.
Your chest was barren,
Your tongue had tried,
Your hands lay cozy at your side,
And mine fell to the floor,
Coughing up confetti catching air between the door,
Spilling petty tête-à-tête to keep some sweet rapport.
The Sallys and The Simons they’re turning their backs,
The cough syrup painted the cities to black,
The sunlight is bathing the buds out to spring,
But they all turned their backs and they missed the whole thing.
At the ninth floor the air had caramelized,
It dripped down my shoulders, elbows, nails,
Into dusty hallway vales,
And trickled to the charcoal floor,
Ten feet from the door,
Ten feet from the only one,
For my knees to crumble and my
hands undone just being in the same room,
Now chiseled down to a halfhearted whisper,
That could be mistaken for the hiss of perfume,
For my limbs and for my sake,
The heavy air had begged me to break,
And then he opened the door.
At that my throat had locked,
The soft light was still ‘til my senses flocked,
His stare made a searing brand in my eyes that read to me,
8 o’ clock.
Eternally 8 o’ clock.
His whisper swept down like a hand that had dived from goose
feather clouds,
Lifting me up toward a gliding sail that was vowed to my face
from a fragile male,
Who was laden with picket-fence pride, green-eyed, where once
there were smoldering tears they had dried,
He picked out the sun and the moon from the sky,
And held them together to make me shrine,
His hands, five miles stretched out to mine,
Pouring his bounds on the finishing line.
The stale air punctured with pool lights and invites of
weekend drifters rustling in their middle age,
Eyes lacquered, suspended in night, and the crumbs of our
adolescence rooted on the page,
Painting your smile with liqueur, bought with crumpled money,
Dripping music like honey, to run and swell in the cracks,
Whispers of the time before us breathing on our backs,
Red bled onto his skin and her skin, there’s no win,
On every side of them the walls began to thin,
Turning to dust passing under their chin,
Crowning our men on a canvas pin.
By the sad Las Vegas eyes,
A kitschy dress, a sour guise,
Her baby skin withered, in midst of her highs,
But I wouldn’t forgive her, so much as she tries.
She etched her plans on her leather-stitched hands,
And dug her own grave in the desert sands,
And I wouldn’t forgive her, so much as she stands.
The sun seeped in through the blinds,
Streaming across his hair and chest and pillow like warm milk,
Cradling his skin in the silk.
And though he bestowed all his teeth to gnaw at bones,
And though he gave his butterscoth to be burned,
And have not love,
I was enveloped in his ilk.
You kissed a belly and it blackened.
With candied lips. On ephemeral trips.
You kissed it again with cushioned laughter.
And slept soundly beside it.
And every night after.
