you promised me mountains
while we dozed
in our sunday best,
even though we never touch
on religion.
i can hear your lungs like
thunder, it is sick of
this place
just as much as every
person who
just wants a taste
of summer with its
heavy humidity and
pregnant skies
daring to give birth
right on top of us.
some of us beg for
the rain,
the pollen covers our magnetic
skin.

that's how i felt when
you left for a sunshine
second.

our zones were tired and
nervous that we couldn't
hold on for much longer.

so i wait.
i can't tell you how many
glances down to my feet
it took to turn off the
faucet that was about to
bust out of my tear ducts
and nasal passage.
it was pretty gross.
but so was the train tracks
across my toes,
i'm pretty sure i didn't see
that thick metal
through the peripherals.
but hey,
i could have just blinked.
or i'm blind.
these eyes are seeing double,
as if i had a strong swig of
battery acid.
it's okay, my mama always said
it was best to sleep it off
my shoulders and
write it in my spine for
another day.
and so it goes,
i'll pull down the covers and
let this fossil bury
down in my
ribs
so one day, i
could read you to
sleep.

the television blares with what you could have been,
soft and delicate or rough and bare.
i couldn't tell if you longed to have those features
swell with fierce magnitudes.

i turned to you, gave you some kind of initiation,
to graze the surface of what this was and what could have been.

whether it held proof or pure fabrications,
i swallowed the facts and liquid courage to
stumble out onto your doorstep.

I emptied my thoughts as you held my hair back,
but it didn't provide much of a conversation.

as i felt the words claw up my throat,
i took another sip on the way back to your room
to let my dignity build back up again.

She couldn’t bring herself to believe that you held your ground for her,
those nights you crossed the highways
and stoplights to reach her doorstep
only to tell her why you can’t use those dusty lungs,
filled with rust and waste, crushing the air you breathe in.

She didn’t have much to say.

You didn’t have much to offer,
just a lot of heart and a little dash of bitter biting your tongue with the ideas that your father put in your head,
the ones that tell you that you can’t feel the beat of your own heart
or taste the saltwater crashing down on your own weathered hands.

No, you gotta be a man.

She listened to your words and chewed on it for a while,
and gathered all her strength to pour the mason jar of alcohol you stashed in her cupboards for last two years down the sink,
as you yelled up to whoever might be listening,

“I never knew it’d go this far, I never thought I’d be this way.”

So she turned on the lights,
made your bed and you laid down to another restless night,
following and circling the cycle you have fallen for over

And over

And over again.