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 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

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

The lies we tell of God
Are no baptisms in a dripping moon
No cleansing in and of sunlight
No anointing me of Earth

The lies we tell of God
A mark of mortal rage
A mourning that glows and devours
The fingerprints of our ancestors

The lies we tell of God
are the lies we tell of ourselves

Sad eyes of scribbles underneath your furrowed brow
Weather beaten, masticated, bashed
The lines of your face burrow and settle in to dwell
They check their mailboxes, set up lemonade stands
And drudge up demons beneath pores
Once you were alone in your purity
The occasional blemish or two
Nothing to make into cities
Nothing like decrepitude

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

The moon looked so cold
It grew quieter and quieter still
And yet I wanted nothing more than to reach out and feel its chill
No disturbances from the light
No face stitched to rock
Only a sliver and a shiver
Circles of glow rung around its neck
And the distant cry of a crow

Blossoms rose beneath twisted limbs
Wrapped around still bones
Still in the encagement of a clock
Shrouded monasteries left stagnant on your dried up lips
As our blood vow lay fallen on this sleeping Earth- that lulled us to sleep with it
What were the words of the sermon that led us barefoot in the night?
That sermon that spilled off the windswept lips of Zephyrus, who carried this light

Uttering praises upon your fair skin
Your dark hair hallowed as sacred
These half deserted dawns mean nothing underneath the weight of your alabaster palms and wrists
Looks of a foreign tragedy without translation
You are sacred transparency
An unknowable thing
Just as we are beneath ourselves

I’d crawl inside the breath of you
Drown beneath your milky skin
And entangle my bones with blue veins
If it meant I could exist a second somewhere within you

My footsteps, the only sound within sight
Small travels from there to here
And here to there
That rolls over the other
Stepping through the blizzards and fallen leaves
Which are forgotten until the next
Some listen for the sound
Some litter them across a page
And others rest their feet

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

How I began to uncoil my love from you
like bits of a cloud dissolving into daylight
the ombré from a dark blue sky to baby blue
the gentle ***** from palm to wrist

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

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

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?

It's in the ballot beneath your brow
It's in the breathless chorus you sing
The agonized clarity of thought and expression
And the night that you bring

To encounter you felt like a tragedy
felt like a bewitchment
To know you was luck itself
To love you was a benediction
You were passion, artistry and fire
To everyone but yourself