I always feel like I’m running.
Not running away, there’s no such thing.
Just running forward towards something.

Something.

There’s no such place.

With how long I've been running
surely I'd have found it by now.

I've though of what it must look like.

Something could be a field
buried in a brilliant, sunlit cloud of alfalfa.

It could be a tundra,
frozen and without borders.

A rainforest,
vivid with life, green and flourishing.

A mountain, lurching
over a city,
and in the city there would be nothing but good men.

No liars, nor cheats.

Just good men and good women,
good drink and bad bars,
blocks and city blocks of motels
riddled, reeking with  the smoke of cigarettes
smoked sometime post-***.

And in the city there would be nothing but goodmen
railing
good men
raving and ranting, chanting for more
railing.

These stairs sure are steep,
I best not fall.

Something could be a desert.
The dunes would stretch, immaculate, across my vision.
The horizon would be sun, sand, and sun again.

Is the sky still blue in a desert?
Is desert wind built of language and faith, or just oxygen heated to boiling?
Is the night full of hushed whispered deviance?
Is the night bent over the day's sofa?
Is he waiting for sunrise?

Rise, sun, rise,
what are you waiting for?

Do it.

It's too cold to smoke.

The thermometer reads twenty-one degrees
imperial.

My chest feels too hot, I best take off this sweater.

You're absent from my bed;
I'd best alert those concerned:

Note to self.

My heart's so *******
I can hardly breathe.

It seems, to me, that every scent is yours
every sight or sound,
song lyric or strip of poetry
relates back to you and the knot in my chest.

I best recruit a young sailor
to untie and bend these cravings.

These faint and vague desires
not to kiss you
nor to *******
but to see you, lay with you, be with you.

That is what I crave daily,
what I need to loosen this knot.

But
the knot
just
tightens.

I crave to see you alone on a walk
or you with others
or you with me.
I especially crave to see you with me.

O' that which I'd give
to see you with me.

It must have been the grass
or the beers
or the LSD
because no natural occasion could make me feel this way.

I first heard you before I saw,
singing across the fence.

Your voice was like cream in hot coffee
scintillating, mesmerizing
fascinating, and light;
a drop of sweet in the dark, dark bitter.

I never knew that drinking coffee black
would soon become impossible.

Everything is
bitter
when you've tasted
sweet.

It's something in the way you visibly think
about the world and
others actions and
everything I say and do; something in the way you care.

It's something in the way you spit,
claiming the concrete as your own, a primal beast.

You are an incarnadine being,
a vastly deep creature whose
curls I can be lost in for
hours and days if not for those eyes.

Those eyes steal me with every glance,
dark mines of copper and fool's gold.

But pyrite is the sheen to which my mind melts,
and Scorpio sun signs
paint the mystique
that keeps me awake and alert all through the night

You keep me awake and alert,
waiting for the next move.

Yes, I'd be a liar if I said I felt friendship for you
and a heretic if I
dared to touch you.
But you dare to touch me. Every day,

you brush your hand 'gainst my leg,
grab my shoulder and hold,
knock your knee upon mine,
you push me gently,
but I die when you grab my thigh,
grab my thigh and squeeze it tightly
reassuring me that you're there
you're real
you're caring for me
and when the goodbyes come
**** the goodbyes
you hug me so closely and so tightly
that my heart,
knotted as it is,
beats faster than it ever has.

I swear that it beats
faster than it ever could.

And in this speed, this conflagration of emotion,
I feel how the knot
only tightens to where
even the youngest sailor lacks the nimbility to loosen it.

I swear that it's much
tighter than it ever was;

that no one has stressed my mind so,
kept my heart strained to where it
beats
faster than it ever could,

it beats faster yet, than the
rush of a train upon steel.

"I've missed you so much,"
I prepare as I walk through the door.

The rich scent of sweet cream
waffle cones and
brownie chunks
float in the air as thick as
smoke
in a happy car.

Her eyes are small and poignant,
tiny apostrophes,
commas beneath her blonde curls.

I stand by the door as she helps a customer.
I've missed her so much.

She glances up and her
perpetual glare fades.
The commas light up,
brilliant,
and the sentence is completed
by the curl of her lips.

I love that smile.
"I've missed you so much."

"That one looks like a dragon,"

you said, extending your arm to the night sky.

Sure enough,
against the aubergine purple,
there is a head
and a tail and a tongue
and a tiny lick of flame.

The wheat feels frigid
when compared to the heat of your waist.

I pull you in closer
terrified that the immensity of this field
will swallow us.

That we would sink down its esophagus,
away from the sky.

The stars are out now.
And I imagine being
swallowed.
Of falling up into the universe.
A celestial dive.

I lick my lips and whisper to you and the stars and even the wheat,

"This night will haunt me forever."

There are some nights when I lay awake,

staring at the darkness of my room,
so dark that my eyes cannot adjust
and it is as black as the base of a stone labyrinth.

When I lay awake and pray and dream and hope
that there will be days in our future that we spend together.

Days when it is just you and me.
When we run barefoot in the sands of some faraway beach,
farenoughaway that all of our problems will be in the past.

In the distant memories of the mountains.

This was the tree I first slept beneath.

It was summertime then, when
nights were warmed by hot breezes
and spritzing sodas were the drink of choice.

She could overthrow a king with the fall of her leaves.

These leaves fallin’ a’briskin’ the air
hung-hangin’ leaves in air cold and frozen—
iced off leaves hangin’ a’swayin’ like a gallow’d man.

Now she is gold and old and losing leaves.

These leaves crinkle like foil
snap, crunch, crinkle
Oh I do hope they are ok.

I pray that Winter will be good to her.

They say it will be a cold one,
I think to myself as I rest against her.
The air smells spiced and dry.

I hope she will be ok.