The sweetness in your laugh
Held all sorts of things
Like dandelion mornings and afternoons
And the way sunlight filters through those estuary clouds
A hope of a hint of normality

And I know I laugh like a harpy
And at times I don't even smile
I laugh with the irony of fluourescent lights
Blinking so unnaturally in comparison
Obsessed with the imitation

Your laugh was full of light
And lit your skin with that quiet sunset
That slanted onto your back and shoulders
Forgive me if I was silent
If I was inexpressive and staring
Forgive me my inability
To step out of my shadows

In the cross of a catharsis
Clasped in hands too tired to understand
Here sit my mother’s worries
Waiting hopefully
For you to open them up like chinese takeout boxes
Put your feet up and break out the plastic forks
And dream of all the ways you could fail to make your mother understand the calmness of the gesture, the inside of my wrist against the back of your neck
And afterwards, I was too tired to make you understand
Too tired of all the little things that became big ones to break up the boredom
And all the things you said that made even the reality seem ridiculous
Pronounced as universal truths, where you are the universe
Pulling those sticky oversweet noodles apart and watching those little strings of supposed damnation snap back into hopeless fatigue
I expected something more from my sins

I found Jesus at the end of the street, up on steps moss-spotted green,
hung on stylized barbed wire sculpted oh-so-sincere.  Of all the things
to pass through my mind, the first is Martha Stewart’s favorite color
combination, its steel grey set against the mint green and beige of the
trailer across the street, alone between the trees.

   I.  Everything is green, even the skies, and it reminds me of you, and
   the blue of the night that ringed itself around yellow-orange
   streetlights.  When you’d walk me home, barefoot, and you’d give me
   what was too easy to be a hard time, with an air that I have failed to
   find in anyone else, and I’d always wonder, I still wonder, if you
   would let me know if I was hurting you.

   II.  And the road twists into chalky grey gravel in construction, and
   the dry dust fog that forms keeps my mouth shut.  It’s sand in my
   lungs or your ridicule in my ears.  And I knew a long time ago that I’d
   met someone who played this hate-game better, the way you lifted
   your eyebrows above your sunglasses.  But we were accomplices
   then, and now we’re just playing alone.  Even as your skin changed
   colors in the morning light, I could see the way you were changing the
   rules.

   III.  And I’ve always loved the way rows in fields unfolded
   themselves to their vanishing point when you looked at them rolling
   by at automobile speeds, and right in front of you is the part in the
   sea, a meticulous divide.  And maybe you are two people:  you are the
   person I came to believe existed, and you are the sterotype I tried
   not to see.  And maybe I am two people as well:  the one who laughs
   when you make your mistakes, and the one who wishes I hadn’t let
   you make them.  We are the same as those green rows:  one day we’ll
   be dead, dry, and cut to pieces.

Lots of houses are orange-yellow peach.  The real color of peach flesh,
bright and acidic, not the milky orange of your peach-flavored
whatever, or the pale pinkness of that crayon that Crayola was too
scared to name Caucasian, but an assaulting yellow, slightly less
aggressive than mango-orange.  The others are soft pink and off-white,
sometimes lazy cement colors.  But there are purple-and-white flowers
that cascade down the walls and over the fences in their May effort,
and it’s ironic to think how thankful I am for the masks of vines hiding
the ugly monotony.

I.  You know I resent you for a thousand things,
like how she and I don’t talk anymore.  But most
of all because you didn’t love me.  Like how you
made everything seem so simple when it wasn’t.  
But most of all because you fooled me
completely.  I resent you for a thousand things,
but I still don’t know what I’ll say when you decide
to come back.  You’ll come back.

II.  Twisting my thoughts around you has
become so simple to do, become a habit.  
Twisting them around you, through you,
drilling into your skin.  But it gets harder and
harder to hollow you out like I would before,
making you into an empty shell that I was much
less afraid of.  I love this ball and chain; Stockholm
syndrome has never been this fun before.

III.  And you’re an entity that doesn’t have a
name.  A mix of so many spirits that excites me
in a way I didn’t know something could.  You’re
a list of intoxications that renders me so
readable it’s dangerous.  I slur my words and
you take my hand like I’d never been so
articulate and charming.

I.  Eventually we forgot your myth because I saw
nothing in it.  An epic’s just opinion, and I couldn’t
find the rhythm, so I abandonned it.  We all have
our own heroes, and it’s for you to write your own
ballads.  You can’t count on me, I have so few
words for you.

II.  You have a knack for the epic:  everything
that comes out of your mouth is pure legend.  
I jump right into your river Styx and know I’m
believing fairy tales again.  What finally surprises
me is how far in I really am, neck deep and still
kicking.  I have all this enthusiasm, only for
getting twisted up with you and your myth.

III.  Tragedies are told for the tears at the
end, and I sing your song with guilt because
it doesn’t hurt enough.  And when it does,
will I be satisfied?  Take back your horses;
go tell Charon that Pluto and my pomegrante
are waiting.

A steady hand against my back
was something I felt like I had won,
Sitting around a table worn smooth
By restless adolescent hands (as we were, always)

Warm to the touch,
The fire that she painted
was slightly pungent like cinnamon
And made me slightly nauseous in the same way.
A sprinkling like cinnamon by the sun
Made a freckled face that pressed against my shoulder.
We felt warm again;
When just days before
We were outside in halfway melted snow and short sleeves
To immortalize ourselves;
Picking apart a radio that was the color of a dusk sky.
Cold blood has always run in my veins,
And my fingers melt and freeze at the slightest provocation.
His blue sweater shocked against a gray and brown wall
Enough to freeze my hands, I thought permanently,
But I melt again with warm water and radiators.
This season I live in constant fluctuation
And my fingers have begun to crack and fall apart
the way that asphalt does.
What was black and certain is now gray and rough.

There was nothing plastic
About the way your smile showed
Or about the way your arms felt
But a voice in the back of my head told me so
And last weekend
I melted a carpet I thought was wool
You could have fooled me
Except now there is a hard, shiny, iron-shaped mark
Plastered into the carpet's soft mat
To be honest, I was a little disgusted
When I pulled the iron away and found
Strings of green and red clinging to it like bubblegum
And to be honest, I felt a little disgusted with myself
Not to mention you
When I left a handprint in your soft back
And strings of skin still sticking to my palm
Prove you, my little plastic boy, are just a doll
By all the tests that matter
A human illusion too easily destroyed
By an excess of warmth