We used to sit
in your bedroom
and climb onto the roof
after midnight, creating stories
for the constellations
that we sometimes drew—

The day we met—
you brought me cake
with the word “Happy”
in green icing;
how it filled the following years—

The drawings we made together,
hung on your walls;
Lego rocket ships
and video games
played until we
would watch the sunrise
from your rooftop—

Picking blueberries
with your mother,
our stained fingers,
the bag that burst
in the car;
the upholstery, soaked,
smelled of them for weeks—

That summer
we built a treehouse—
you fell off,
broke your arm,
and I wrote
of your Icarian shot at flight—

The camping trips—
the time we saw an eagle
land not three yards before us,
and the picture you drew
from memory that night—

The day you moved
to New Orleans—
we sat on your roof
the night before,
trading treasures:
my notebook of our stories;
your box of our drawings—

The letter you wrote,
eight months before
you left this world,
says you love the art
but hate the artists;
you once told me
“life is art,”
and sometimes I think
I know what you meant—

Now I wonder
if our constellations
befriended you,
and if you watch
with them and draw
pictures of me,
as I still write
stories of you.

You are a blind man’s poem.

I read your body in Braille,
the rhyming lines of your brow
swept down
toward the soft turn of your cheek
and your lips’ closed couplet.

I trace your back like a riverbed,
the pebbles of your spine
washed smooth
by the soft waves that rush
through the valley of your shoulders.

I walk my fingertips across chill-bumps,
the lyrics of sighs on your chest,
kept silent
with the rhythm of breaths
held back against beating hearts.

I sweep my lips over planes,
the landscape of your limbs,
laid bare
beneath this blind man’s gaze
and found no less beautiful by cecity.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is
as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip
of my words. My language trembles with desire.
-Roland Barthes

My* language is a skin I have outgrown.
It sloughs off in flakes,
leaving letters or the occasional
ill-suited, illegible word
trailing behind me.

I pick at adverbs and articles
hanging from my fingertips;
This morning I pulled a whole phrase
off my arm like a sunburn.

My language, once alight,
now settles like cinders
on the ground,
around the shower drain,
upon my sheets;
My language no longer serves me.

Peel my vocabulary off my back,
tear my diction from my shoulders,
and my syntax from my chest;
Scratch the punctuation off my face—
my lips are chapped with parentheses.

Tomorrow I will have shed my language—
Unbound from an ill-fitting lexicon—
coughed the alphabet from my lungs
and exhaled the last serif
like cigarette smoke
to find the world new,
uncontained and undefined.

O my delectable magnificent!
Thou art so subtle and, in truth, divine;
Thy taste doth merely whisper peppermint
As it consumes my body and my mind.
Thou dost imposeth here upon my core,
With such a minty thinness that doth quell,
The softness of a glutton and yet more,
Though rampant want within my gut still dwells.
But whilst, at first, thou hast great quantity
And flaunt thyself to me as decadent,
In but two bites, thou hast abandoned me
And left me naught such goods as Heaven sent.
Until bereft I find the box so nice,
Which cost my purse a total dollar thrice.

In our eighth year as friends, we reached
        a little further
between sheets,
        bleached white and starched, in
the contrived ambiance
        of a hotel room.

More cautious than nervous, we peeled
        to bare flesh
and proceeded
        slowly, carefully, as though
we might break our
        well-seasoned past with
our fresh exploration.

        Both of us knew what
we each always wanted—
        youthful tensions,
now matured into
        full-scale desire—
and pursued it,
        dismissing our prior reserve
as unfounded.

        Our hands,
warm beneath
        cotton and denim,
explored contours, sought
        softness
with increasing confidence.

        As trepidations
diffused into
        a scene of
two old friends, now
        new young lovers,
she paused
        at a joke made
in sharp contrast
        to our actions.

We waited,
        long enough to
inhale and
        share a glance before
we both collapsed
        in laughter.

I stand, confused, on
Searing September pavement
       in Alabama.

saccharine syllables float
from warm lips in
the red
of the sunrise morning,
       shining
through cream colored shades.

blue tulips lie
on the windowsill,
       waiting
to be walked in on.

love roams
over the stairwell and
beneath the cupboards,
permeating a house,
       a home,
a life.

fingers write
on mirrors opaque
from morning showers,
       hoping
you will read them and smile.

my own eyes glide
across pages,
under blankets,
       anxious
for you to join me
this autumn dawn.