You’re not the kind
who stops to think
when I’m leaning on your car door,
folding what looks like a question in my hand.

Memories always feel like summer,
hot and ethereal,
and I suppose there’s more left to you than memories,
but it doesn’t feel like it.
You have no winter in you.

And that folded question
looks like a piece of paper,
but it is warm
and my legs are bare
and its crease is the hem of your t-shirt,
held between my fingers.

I.  I am the reason I never had more than a minute’s chances with anything.  Sitting on steps with you became the same thing as being in love, because we were together--you, me, and cigarettes.  Strange became anything, holding court in a playground planetarium and I took closer to be a state of mind.

II.  Nothing ever dies, and I have beautiful sore spots that flower like fields in blood and lymph and bruises.  Your fingerprints were black on my neck and it was nothing short of spectacular that heavy silence and the same song on endless repeat even failed to slow you down.

III.  My greatest love is the possibility and words that mean nothing to anybody except someone I used to be.  I was the stranger and I shot myself four times to spend eternity in purgatory here with you.

I don’t know much about love
but I would pay to smash you
on a hard tile floor like a cheap porcelain doll.
Because there is something about
the way your t-shirt rests on your collarbone–

and it has always been that way–

that makes me want you collared and tethered like a dog

I was rolling in your current
with eyes open,
Slight and threading downstream.

My eyes were slipping closed with your sleep;
lucid dreaming of real things that had been
and how alive you used to seem.

I was lying in your bed
and wrapping my arms around an idea of you,
visions on my eyelids
of all the better places I could be.

I.  Life was like alternating tides in your hands.  I spent my time in crushed nausea between your currents, confused and longing, and calm waters slow and disappointed.

II.  You seemed so delicate, almost like a girl with your shirt hanging off one bony shoulder, and I wanted to imagine it undone, but you were so easy to underestimate.

III.  All your windows face to the east, and our evenings never saw you in direct sunlight, so tell me why the present seems so bright, and the future so dim.

The calm is blinding
and becoming almost indistinguishable from the buzz
I could speak to you in tongues
and your eyes would stay the same shade of wide
ringed with blue and buzzing with the same rhythm
If I could dig my nails any deeper into your skin
I might turn your irises black
You could call me by any name
and I would answer to it
to break the silence that vibrates with your touch

Your words reflect off each other like blinding mirrors, amplifying your small interior sun.  I sputtered out with those dying bursts in our so recent history, and maybe any glimmer that can now be found is a lost remnant, lightyears-old, reason not enough to strike out matches for me.  Despite the dark, you do fine all by yourself.  Your words, bounding off each other one by one by one, marking in relief with sharp cutting shadow my failing flame.  On my knees, a tribute to what felt like fomer glory.