I stepped out onto the grass
A rustling of leaves
A drip, drip, drip that slowed to a silence
He watched me
Watched beneath a weeping willow as the branches danced with the howling of the wind
My hands, small
I was just a girl, only knew the dangers of lions, tigers and bears
Who else could I have been?

As you danced beneath my eyelids
There was kicking within my womb
A silent call that begged to be assumed
You pulled and pushed from here to there

Neither inside of my heart
I bathed and cleansed my soul
Although it tore part from part
Craved within and without
I would enter sleep if I could

A dark and wondrous mourning
That stood silent as the grave
All that was left of you
Pieces of echoed art

So late have you fallen under a banished moon
Everlasting we fought the spheres of our own humanity
A thing unachieved so soon
We ran rampant over the Earth's blue daze
and scribbled over the democracy of time
An imposing and commanding craze
that drowns the howling wolves

The green shade languidly hung over your shoulder
As I glinted and gleamed my way past
The distant scent of the garden
Melons and magnolias amassed
The locusts sing their summers song
While you take a sip of iced tea
The billowing heat simmers my cheeks
As I wipe the dirt from my knees
I meet your eyes beneath sunglasses
Hold onto your name for good luck
When summer ends, can we still pretend
That were brazen and moonstruck?

I've lost my name far away amongst the trees.
It's intertwined with the thorns and poison.
The hazy purple moonlight that was once coated in plastic and paper, whose name I struggled to remember, now watches every movement and tells its friends of my mistakes.
That moonlight that was once deliciously hushed and tranquil becomes vaguely unnerving. I pray for it to rush into a sunrise so I can retrieve my name
A name that belongs only to me
A name that will tell them who I am

Far off are you, praying for your abandoned youth
A dream dripping of honey and rosy cheeked naivety
Tendrils of chestnut and bouncing curls would cradle a face of polished glass

You would spin in those bell like circles, giggling
Giggles which were hymns
And then you turned and turned into that place which cracked that glass face

It rested at your feet
Covered in sand and salt
Your golden hair strummed your shoulder blades
Created a song for the breeze that passed with it
Eyes deftly searched the shoreline
Measured it a thousand times
and over again
With a sigh and disillusioned swirl
You lamented through the jaded night
Leaving your buried treasure
resting in the wake of the verdict

Gazes at imperfect flesh
Two entities intertwining through a solstice dream
On a perfect night for dreaming
Memorized proportions, freckles and depths once reached
Eyes that knew more of me than myself
But one must wake

These torments of life and death meet at those great and mawing jaws of beasts and angels
You, the embodiment of innocence, were swallowed hole
Sinking inch by inch into the cruel sacrifices of God and consumption.

I saw you with your eyes wide open as you finally reached the edge of the precipice of that pink and hungry throat
Being crushed at your soft places to fit into that great and lifeless void that forced itself upon you, drawing you inside

I saw you as your face was last seen to the world
Panicked, squawking
And then submissive to that insurmountable grip, that great disappearing

You were swallowed hole
And there he sat upon a sunny rock, digesting and wholly alive

Bound to a shadow
No knowledge of the flesh that casts
All of these thoughts must reveal me somewhere within your mind
Somewhere like a cave
Deep and knowable only to those dark creatures
Like you and I

Or maybe it doesn't exist at all
Along with my idea and these thoughts which evoke no consequence
Maybe I'm somewhere like a desert

The half light of sunset stretched itself past those sleeping giants on the shore - my lover said they looked like shy snails with their heads buried beneath the sand, as the light made its way into our hungry eyes

I would capture you on film
All silvery in the moonlight
You were a swan in my minds eye
Cursed to your white purity
Cradled inside of your perceived fragility
But you were not fragile at all, were you?

You held the moon beneath your ribcage
And your breath - the night could not go on without

Draped over your braided thoughts
there lies lace and little beauties
It is almost a sort of glaring cruelty
that you clasp it, white knuckled and selfish
wholly absent from this hollow place

Underneath rests sweet innocence, a harbinger of angels,
souls and quiet romanticism
Eyes closed to that flickering flame which gasps, dying so steadily at your suspended little toes
You are still, frozen
other than those fluttering eyelashes and hungry eyes that look up at those beautiful and wicked angels which lilt only for you

The shape of you is like a bottomless purgatory
like a living thing but never at all
Desperately I've clawed at those spaces
trying to carve you out of them

Just your shape
Your perplexing, invisible and selfish shape

My breath fogs the glass of the restaurant window
All humidity and rain through which there is still no shape
that could be salvaged as yours
I'm covered in soil in those spaces
I'm buried in the shape of you

There was a dream in depth
That rose only where you were
A place where spring grew louder
A place where winter blurred

The dream was of an amber glow
And all of our demons lay slain
You held me deep within you
With all the others you have maimed

There was a dark blue sky
That grew darker by the day
It might have only been in my mind
This sky that’d be black someday

Closing my eyes and I imagine
That place where we would stay
You held me in your broken arms
And told me it would be okay

I would like to revel in my own ******
Own it as I own the things which were once my fleeting desires
But I’m hidden within wrought iron fences, which dehydrate an indigenous testimony
Bits of a reticent self volatilize within the dead of night
Like a whole civilization strangled and erased from history

In a place made up of my own dreams,
the rocks timidly cover themselves with moss and vine.
Even in this place, made up of the purest honey and lullabies,
absence was conquered
not with a sword or a battle cry
but with a gentle sigh that brushed up against castle stone, the soft melancholic pull that inverted my chest

Why are you harbored so far off from the shore?
My dearest isle of dreams

Your fingers, which used to trance the slopes of my skin, only touch air and exertion
Your eyes, which used to remind me of Moroccan waters, have been smothered out by their own memory
So blatantly intangible, it's as if they never were blue
Ash has settled in the spaces we would lie
Our heartbeats replaced with elements of loneliness and lust
So I've been neither here nor there
Floating, suspended- like a star hung out to dry
Lost for a heart and yellowing out on the wind

I saw my name on the corner of your mouth
like a tear stuck between lips
If your heart beats like mine, say it aloud
If your lingering glances stay fleeting, swallow them whole