Hired out by his heart,
seven years after that sun high when
he saw her, he worked, waited,
was tricked, yet traded his time,
never giving up on father’s second daughter
and nigh their wedding night, he tells her:
*for you, I did, I do, I will.

You thought I might have lasted longer,
loved you better, if I was stronger
I'd bloom in the stony garden
you grew in, because somehow it's weak,
unwilling to will a future where saving you
means selling me and buying the deed
to a house with hardened hearts
where they tell the children stories
about their mother’s lies, how she wiles
her way into the mind of their father
and don’t you worry, darlings, they whisper
*there there, in these arms you’re safe.

In profile is the only way I see you these days
or from behind, in the way the sun can’t shine
through shades drawn you closed your heart
and your face followed, eyes front, soldier,
don’t you dare look at her who dares closer,
orders coming from your need to stay a loner.

I behind her watching in the cold room she unzips
my gift blue bagged and pink skinned pungently
I exhale she inhales turning away from
my half-closed eyes closing her eyes
stinging from the stench of
my body given for her
for the blade of her scalpel to
slice she cuts along my spine
and I trace ghostly fingers in a line
down her shivering back to say there
that is the place where
what you see beneath in me is you.

Only God watched me as I watched
you, running your fingers through
your hair to tame it as the wind
tried to taste it--a delicious moment
made for swallowing to keep
inside me because
these seconds of savoring you
seem a sweet and secret sin.

To put it plain, you’re cheating:
your eyes are wandering off the test in front of you
and into grass that still seems green, like
the eyes you suddenly fall into when they smile
and dance on a face so much like
the one you used to love when
you were young and now again,
you strain at commitment’s tether
because on the other side of the fence
there might be more to life than getting old.

You remind me of that boy down the street
who rode his skateboard
running chills along my spine
in the heat of a summer evening,
the boy who inspired my mother to pray--
Lord, please protect her from those
heartbreaker eyes that gleam with
too much laughter and not enough love--
the boy whose July birthday I still remember
because he was bad in all those good itchy ways
begging me to just scratch a little harder now
though I was young with blunted fingernails
so he never meant more than
the diary buried in a box in my garage or
an shivery afterthought on summer nights,
but here you are, the boy next door made man
you meet me, still that girl yet woman so
what's running along my spine aren't chills
they're flames begging me to just burn a little badly
now, inspiring me to pray--
Lord, please put the fire out before I am consumed.