Quietly sleeping, maybe dreaming,
I hear your heartbeat over mine.
I like it better.

Not long ago we spent nights awake,
holding hands, staring past the ceiling
fumbling for words like kids
arranging lettered magnets on a refrigerator door.
So afraid of the feelings
buzzing in our chests like frenzied honeybees
and the sweet, simple words they made
in the combs of our hearts.

The sweet, simple words on the tips of our tongues.
Oh, I could taste them each time you kissed me.

Now we lie here,
quietly sleeping, maybe dreaming
or holding hands, staring past the ceiling
resting on the flowerbed our love made.

What exactly does it mean for me
to wisely my time allocate--
abstain, refrain, to lie in wait?
What more, in afterlife, will I see
in living this life pleasure-free?
Have I opted out of golden gate,
if I, myself, do desecrate,
a Plan which may or may not be?

What precisely does it mean for me
to think instead I choose free-will?
Is there such thing as novelty
or is all written, so it shall be?
As the great end nears, I will know nil;
as I know not now, I will know then, still.

I've never been the type
to let my heart burn a hole in my pocket.
I never needed to be told
not to spend it all in one place.

But you,
you are an investment.

It's all currency-
our time and attention,
affection and joy.

I'd like to spend it all with you.

On my way from you,
taking the last trip down your steps,
I slipped on ice we'd watched freeze from sheets of sleet,
from sheets of jersey cotton.

I caught myself,
but not before thinking back to that fall evening,
to the warm rain that oiled the top of the stairs across town;
back to when, on my way to you,
I left him
and lost my footing.

Grace aside, these moments
parallel in a way that fissured not bone,
but my psyche--
defining at once
this new she who sought one,
despite she who belonged to another.

Oh, the things she did say,
this foreign half of me,
as, descending your crystal-coated staircase,
she heard herself, for the last time, speak.

We had both fallen so in love with the sound of her voice.

On my way from you,
I caught myself,
and let her, broken, fall.

The overhang saves my parking place
on warm nights, too dark for walking.
Green and alive, it juts out above the brick,
a shapely mess of twig and vine.

By noon, I unlock my doors to find
that it has littered my car with seedpods.

Each with five projections:
finger-like, with digits,
like your hands, like your fingers;
sliding off my body as I pull away.

In moments,
I am half-way home
and my car is clean.