If you can feel it in your hands, you can take a bite of it.
Words I live by
when the trees slouch and the day fades faster.

We meet in the backseat.
The crunch of gravel under bald tires,
and the resounding halt among the wind-dried pines,
the parking break squeak and seat-belt clatter.
We waste no time-- slick upholstery
and quite honestly no shame,
just claws and sweat and dripping, sated lips.

The air waxes saccharine,
cloistered like this in a pile of limbs,
ambrosia-addled as we are.  
But the cloying reek of it--
of something overripe and rot-ward bound--
sanctifies this feast.

And despite the rush and rising ache,
we both accept the sacrifice.

I couldn't sleep tonight,
I had a song stuck in my mouth. I licked
my lips and let it out slow and low, slurring
the words that only you'd know, a dizzy
resonance in Morse for you,
for whomever,
for nothing.

I must be speaking from the dark.
From the static-muffled space in my mind
where the late-night humming is restless, where
the blurry parts of you throb against
my sinews, 'till  I succumb, let lax
my lips and let you out;

I couldn't sleep tonight,
or any stifled night like this,
You: mulled, heady, sonorant at my tongue.

Me: flushed, spinning,
amplified.

A fifth-wear flannel, reek and all, drifted past me today,
came and went as I sat cross-legged, marinating in the patina-ed
post-meridian.
He took one last apathetic drag from a half-burnt
cigarette.

Let it fall through his fingers and onto
the cobblestones below. Callous:
an afterthought, he ball-changed and crushed
the smoke-spitting litter
underfoot.

Left me to stare at it there,
still twisting plumes
of itself up and out, streaking, snatched away
in the wind.

Left me to watch this
wisp of him sputter its
death-throes in the street.

I step into the mid-June semi-dark to place
his letter in the mailbox. I flip
the flag to attention, adjust
my polyester robe, open a slit
wider down my center, let the tepid,
lukewarm twilight graze
my nakedness beneath.
I recede up the driveway,
padding barefoot upon the still-warm asphalt, when
the resonant hum of the bikes on the bypass
behind the trees seems to
all at once
lay flush upon the parts
of me left bare, the flashbulb
fireflies too bright, too alive for
the nocturnal lull,
and I pause at the stoop;
After a breath I step
dazed into the hushed air-conditioning
of the foyer, starstruck and
overexposed.

My eyes swimming, the lamplight
bobbing as it is held in my gaze; I watch
the door swing closed with a
resounding click.

Just a moment before were your hands, floating
an arms length away from the sun-
warmed duvet, shuffling in the effort
of untangling your headphones,
methodically stowing them in the
pocket of your jeans.

The door sweeps shut, your silhouette in
the hallway lighting now stifled and
the dancing figures
of the oak leaves are
swaying together upon the carpet. The window
glowing soft and meandering over my shoulder.

With a resounding jolt of latch meeting strike
plate; I am left with the hum of passing electricity,
the grazing cadence of
my exhales,
and the lukewarm divot in the sheets where
I hold your departed presence captive.

Two less-than-people,
****** and lounging

buck naked on your faded comforter.
The sun too bright, the air too thick,
our lips too slick with
the taste of each other.
In short,


the act of cracking
our rib cages open just
wide enough to let the dust out.

Tonight, my bed is uninviting, and the moon too bright.
I get down on my knees; I send you
a prayer:

I hope you still find strands of my hair
clinging to your sheets, collected in the dryer’s lint trap,
strewn at the back of your dresser drawers.
Despite the figures of my absence-- in lunar cycles and miles--
I sometimes linger in that humming interlude before sleep,
picturing you twisting in those wrinkled sheets,
flipping the pillow only to uncover my lingering scent.

The full moon is glaring; You,
like myself, must be restless
at this witching hour, stringing
words together, our thread-count tripling
as the stars blink out. But,
close that tired moleskine eulogy. Tuck
it in some ill-attended corner of your
room along with the remaining,
waning remnants of me,

and sleep.