I can still taste your love on the corners of my mouth

‘Unclothed, you are true, like one of your hands’**
XXVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Unclothed, you are true, like one of your hands,
lissome, terrestrial, slight, complete, translucent,
with curves of moon, and paths of apple-wood:
Unclothed you are as slender as a **** ear of corn.

Undressed you are blue as Cuban nights,
with tendrils and stars in your hair,
undressed you are wide and amber,
like summer in its chapel of gold.

Naked you are tiny as one of your fingertips,
shaped, subtle, reddening till light is born,
and you leave for the subterranean worlds,

as if down a deep tunnel of clothes and chores:
your brightness quells itself, quenches itself, strips itself down
turning, again, to being a naked hand.

There are constellations between your teeth and you have starlight wrapped around your tongue, there is moonlight in your eyes but sunlight in your smile
Every time you breath you inhale glitter and oxygen and powdered sugar, the scent of grass and strawberries and hope
Flowers bloom between your ribs and wind through the joints in your hips, your knees, your wrists
There is a whole menagerie in your stomach, butterflies and pelicans and Bengal tigers
Your skin is crushed velvet, silk and lace, encasing a skeleton of steel and iron, silver filigree
Your hands are soft as cotton, rose petals, strong as the will of all your ancestors.
When you die you will melt back into the earth, disintegrate and fall back to where you came from
You will be absorbed back into the atmosphere and the universe will swallow you up.
It will rearrange your atoms and produce something completely you but completely different.
You are one of a kind, you are the entire universe.
You will never be again, but you will never stop being.

your cold
black eyes
and
your
steely blue hair
betrayed
by this
maple-morning
atmosphere

Dripple
Like sweat, like Rain
Your mind
Where's your head?

Someday,
I'll retire where it rains and storms,
and I'll sit out on the back porch
with the girl I love
and watch the lightning strike,
and we'll find out
how powerless we are,
and how beautiful it is to see
the silhouette
of a mountain tree

For now, I'd rather imagine
and write about that day,
even as electricity
lights the sky before me

I long for you, my beauty,
The one who will put
the rest of creation
in its place

Her face, flawless and filtered, flows over
my chest, ribs, stomach, hips, fitting the curved
mounds of my body, and even within simplicity
of thread and dye, I sense her presence as her face
hangs from my frame, a statement louder than pillow-lips,
Nancy Sinatra-hair and a glamorous 60’s ***** face.

When paired with leggings and an artfully-distressed denim jacket,
I become a member of the “freshman generation of degenerate
beauty queens,” a hipster fallen to the circumstance of youth,
but I wear her face and the romance of it all reminds me:
we are not defined as Lolitas lost in the hood, or distant,
airy voices in a sea of crude jokes and half-baked skits

meant to highlight shortcomings of a person who doesn’t give
two *****. Lana fits me better than my ribbed, red
sweater and even amidst gods and monsters,
this T-shirt makes pretty last, and I am just as cool.

i saw you showing off
and getting along
and making conversation.
you were all doing the same thing.
it was like watching a bunch of animals having ***.
it did nothing for me.

swanky hip-shuffles;
they care on a different capacity.
they're still learning.

foster the acorns
that feather the surroundings.
bright lights & smaller hope.
indefinite misery lies
on the periphery of regret.

come on changeling.
the hairs on my arm stand *****
for the hot knife to crackle.
show me the silly side.

i'm here still waiting.
arguing for a concept that
we both could waltz to.

every strand of your hair is another level of
complication. the tangles are lathered with a devotion
that has bent me broken.
my story is one of splintered wood
and nails made of toxic metals.
an ocean of surprise swept over me,
and the splashes didn't hurt me this time.

ice-cold fingernails keep calm when the moon
is up; there is an effervescence underneath my covers,
and tonight i will love myself.