If only I'd found love in something that never loved before.

The stars, shimmering off moonlit rivers, would sing for us,
Walking hand in hand, beside you.
Authoring the pages of our laughter,
You would covet words never spoken from your searching eyes, your reaching fingers.
Songs and poetry would flow from the ballpoint fingers we interlace.

But this love is naught found in reality,
Only found in death.
The textbook mind with unmistakable power,
The chapped lips continually trembling.
The beast locking doorknobs and car handles,
The creature shaping children's nightmares.
In death, where nothing exists but itself,
His sweeping arms would blanket the civilian he desires,
No arguments,
Death receives his utmost wishes entirely
always.

Death would cradle his lover in passion.
Death's infatuation would match no other man in the entirety of human existence.
Death would linger with each wisp of life escaping his lovers body,
Sipping them through his curled tongue like tobacco smoke.
Death would never lose his lover,
Death would find his lover in eternity and reincarnate her into flesh again,
The most bloodless cycle of all.

If only I'd found love in something that never loved before.
But this love is naught found in reality,
Only found in death,
The most bloodless cycle of all.

In good time the leaves will turn with fall.
The hearts of boney legged men will tone,
And I'll still be waiting,
Breath baited,
As I watch from a distance our connection
Drip toxicity and dissolve the fragile string that held us
In a perfect repulsive state with brilliant resonance,
Suspended at an equilibrium that allowed these trees to paint their seeded leaves.

My tree trunks tremble in the rickety winds
When your bird-like tongue,
Dry and writhing,
Whispers Shakespearean love into my stems,
Feeding me photysynthetically.
I lean into your fuzz embroidered wings,
Pillowing my leaves and supporting my
Cumbersome mass.

Our love is as natural as the grass plains in Oklahoma pre-Dust Bowl,
The slopes of the snowcapped Rockies,
Or the fragile tide pools of Southern California.

I am your sycamore, your willow that rarely weeps.
You save me from the stagnant waters of revolving seasons,
And grace me with a fascinating new level of life.

The dodecahedral light fixture wants to hover into my ear canal,
Humming distraction and anxiety,
Scratching at my white matter.
It nests on my shoulder, festering as a cystic rat
Nibbling at my lobe,
Tickling my spinal cord base.
Its patched gold foil,
Peeling from the age in which it has existed,
Dusts the line of my hair
In a metallic luster.
But this vintage incandescence only ignites my passion even stronger.
The bulb illuminates the dark corners of this coffee shop,
Blanketing any traces of apprehension,
Any remnants of doubt in saturated confidence.

My father sips his coffee and gazes at the suspended geometric glass object
Chained to the ceiling,
Residing over my command of the building,
And is indicatively pleased with my excellence.
The whipped cream glistens on his captivated mustache.

She came back on Christmas
to don the polyester white tree
and fleece lined blankets hung over edges of chairs.
But she always forgot to say goodbye,
as the hinges creaked upon her betrayal.

To fill the gaps between solstice seasons,
I stood in place
While party balloons hung plastered
to our shallow walls for months.
Other days a bath house for aching joints.
But never for the woman in question,
because she only came for Christmas.

The hours grew into days which encroached into weeks.
The dog-walkers passed,
The mail man caressed my farthest reach each noontime,
The daughter and son toiled with the mower,
The rake, my lungs (the dehumidifier).
The mother checked my fever on Thursdays.
But my rooms were empty all year,
Until the week of rushed decorations
And mass tear-down. All within four nights.

I guess the vacant tree gave me comfort.
The fibered needles and flame retardant tree stems.
I pictured each dollar store ornament as an entity of you,
Pulsing with life and beating of blood,
Vibrating in sync with the refrigerator and furnace.
But the fever-checking mother caught me mid-April
Molesting your Christmas tree, draining every ounce of humanness left.

And I knew when fever checker shoved it upstairs
You'd never come back to me again.

I was right.