you know that feeling you get when you wake up
right before the alarm clock goes off?
that is us.

we are as carefully constructed as sand castles...

always one grain away from the hour.
just one inch too short of making the rollercoaster,
and tippy-toes now just won't cut it.

we are a missed flight.
i ran my fastest, carrying along our bags, bulky and heavy.

my palms keep getting blistered,
and i know for sure its not the monkey bars
or that baseball bat,
i kept swinging.
one homerun for every hundred fouls.

we are one mile short of the marathon.
a violin strung too tight to symphonize.
a micrometer short of the ratio--the golden
green of nature. but Frost knows best
that nothing gold can stay.

we are the silver medal,
and never could i settle for second best.

we are tired, weighted eyes
longing for closure,
and peaceful slumber.
but our lids are taped wide open
and we have stared too deeply,
too certainly and stubbornly,
into the past that
like an orphan on his birthday,
there never came a present.

we are that feeling.

we are the breaking point,
that moment right before you lean in
for a kiss you'll never get to steal.

the longing after lightning
for the thunder,
only ever finding silence.

and no law of physics can explain
this hole now.

we are a dead and ancient language,
a star that burned out just one century too early
to ever shoot into a wish.
a wave lost in the ocean,
a tree fallen in a forest so vast,
so pure, so untouched,
it didn't even deserve to make a sound.

we are two figments of one imagination.
a dream we are both too afraid to wake up from,
a grip so tight that everything just slipped...

...away into the wind that caught
your hair
and mine
and the wing of a seagull,
soaring steady above the coast
into a sunrise
we will never arrive in time to catch.