Your curls are Gulf Coast weather,
rarely cloudless and sunny, each
frustrating loop a messy
ice-cream scoop cascade.
They look like a love affair,
as ***-centered as your star sign,
too-friendly, sunday-sensuous,
meandering into ***** knots.
Every sweet-floral-fruity
custard you toss them in
is as well deserved as the
satin on your lashes and the
salve that slicks your
orbicular body.

The precipice smells of gasoline;
perturbation proceeds the drop and I
am yet too sticky to fly.
On the verge of awakening,
the dark chrysalis has formed around me
in too-thick ropes of viscous feeling
and if I could but break through
the sun might once again
dry my wings.

This silk is eager for damp skin.
It clings greedily to the peaks of
your topography, obscuring, like
fog, only the depressions.
I am a basin filled with fluid,
eager to capsize,
to spill out over this tile floor
like so much vanilla bath water.
At your heat, I boil.
I billow out from beneath
cream and sugar taffeta
with the whispered sigh of
softly hissing steam and
in tendrils, my tempestuous
mist and moisture form
settles lightly into your
crevices.

From between the tendril-thin roots of a silver sapling, they burst forth from the earth, first beaks and black-bead eyes, unblinking. They hap-dash scrabble from clinging dirt, swiveling, twitching curious little heads and shaking dark wings to clear them of any dust. Then, one-by-one,  they hop-skip forward and shoot up in graceless flight to soar between glass towers that reverberate with their raucous cries, until the flawless mirror-pane shatters and falls, tinkling, back into the realm of dreams.

On a slow summer evening,
cherry-stained and giggling,
I sit on one side of the porch and
you both on the other though
it is going to take you two, with
your green eyes and red fingers like
chapstick or popsicles, 100
days in a fast space ship to reach me.
Hopefully the cherries you’re bringing
along won’t spoil before you arrive
on my alien planet (alien though
you share more of my
molecular makeup than any others)
and in return I’ll show you some new
creation but in all fairness I should
be thanking you for who I am
because it was, after all,
you two who shaped me.

Diffidently, so as not to disturb the silence,
I dip dripping paddles into the distorted image
of blue-broken green above my head,
each quiet splash sending my little vessel
flying across this peaceful mirror sky.

Beneath the moss-draped canopy, all is still,
heat-oppressed and thick with clinging moisture while
reed-throated and washboard-legged insects
spill their lullabies into the laden air
just for my thin-blooded heart to hear.

Before me stretches dark mystery,
possibly shallow, possibly deeper than I imagine,
murky liquid hiding the algae-cursed treasure
of some forgotten Spanish explorer, to whom
these still waters would have seemed so alien.

To me, this place is as familiar as the distant peals
of treble laughter that awaken memories
of my not-so-distant past, more simple and refreshing
than the drops sliding down the browning skin
of my arms as I work to pull myself forward.

It doesn’t matter whether the sun breaks free of its night-time prison in a glorious conflagration of pink and yellow or if it approaches coldly in wan white and pale blue, the birds will up and announce its coming as soon as light wakes them from their arboreal sleeping places. Either way, they do not sing of our star’s beauty because there is enough color on each of their feathered ******* to inspire symphonies. Instead, they only call out a discordant cry that is later echoed by the two-legged inhabitants of this earth: “Look at me, look at me, look at me.”