We were on the curb and
    Our toes were numb
You talked about impossibility and I was too loud
            (It was dark and the neighbors could hear)
Your lips looked softer in headlights
     And artificial electricity
I tried not to stare because if I looked too closely
I could see you
You took the eyes on your fingertips
       And saw up my sweater
And my palms inhaled your cologne
             (The gravity of familiarity)
I felt like a silhouette on the concrete
My head was underwater and your body was a few
      Inches about the surface
I could almost feel you
We left our shadows behind a parked car
    And you left an imprint in my mouth
I can still taste you under my tongue if I think about it
Move off that street
            I think they knew and it screams of metal

Smoke on the windowsill
Dust and ash clinging to bare feet
Cigarettes numb the air
Sighing each other to sleep in synchronization
Breathe slow

Half-sipped cups and sticky residue
Strewn playing cards collapsed on the carpet
Crumbs and remnants of socialization
Empty chairs
Silent atmosphere

Eyes open in a sleeping room
Anxiety pooling in jittery feet
Twice heavy breathing in tandem
Syncopated with a third dissonant exhalation
Closed blinds

There's a mug on the windowsill with cold coffee
Abandoned as a
Thought shivered out the open door
Nearby fingers attempt
To mold each other into
A perfect stone ball
Pushing bone against bone
Those hands
Turned serpents
Slipping out of their skin
Drift to the floor
With shed fingertips
Tapping purple toes

There it is, that recurring image of the world through the end of a straw with my own body in darkness. My feet become the concrete on which they stand and everything is a vibration I'm not a part of. There it is, that walk home where my feet wilt the weeds and the sun darkens the street. My toes dry the silt into dust and the waiting wind blows it around me and heat congeals it into the pores of my skin. So there I am, walking on weeds with dust skin baking in the sunlight staring at the world through a tiny orb of light occasionally dotted with a foreign, unforgiving face. The wasps in my frontal lobe are agitated again, buzzing and pushing against confines of my orbital sockets up into my forehead. Even shutting my eyes doesn't help this time and all that heaviness without origin still remains, subtly flattening brain matter like the insidious unfurling of a fan.

The light was dim and caramel and each step down the hallway pulled pieces of me towards the floor with something more than gravity until the room was marked with objects stained with me. Jellyfish bloomed up in my stomach with an intricate urgency. I could still taste the steam and soap on your neck. Our bodies were improvisational ossilation. I lost my mouth in your tongue and didn't find it again until you pulled it out of the air. I traced your body with my body in an artistic study of the interaction of line and curve and color. There wasn't enough oxygen and the couch suffocated, we just held our breath and shared contaminated atmosphere. Now I think of you and your hands past tense. Daydreams bend time and space, no longer here, but then-when you wished I wore a dress and I did too and your body was heavy and pink and exposed and I was out of breath with the weight of your heaviness and warm with the proximity or your pinkness.

We’re all waiting for that someday somebody that will make our skin feel like liquid gold and make flowers grow out of our ears. There’s a the Milky Way in our neurons that we’d be left to discover on sleepy afternoons in October when the leaves are still look like ripe peaches and the sun sets at 6 o'clock. In the spring we’d lay out in a field of wild flowers with syncopated voices filling the atmosphere and feel weeds growing beneath us until they found our heart beats. We’d feel our blood run quiet and warm and even our teeth would feel soft and our knees would be smiling. We’d lay there in the swelling silence of yes and inhale the floating flower seeds in the wind. We’d cough up bluebells and brambles for weeks. I’d make a map of all your freckles and connect all those cities with rivers of arteries until I could carry you around in my pocket in all your perfect symmetry. We’d laugh at the sun and squint at the moon. There's something too shadowed about it and it'd make me feel nauseated, but your feet would make the ground feel more solid and I’d find solace in the ridges of your fingerprints. We’d be all kinetics and soft, milky shower steam. Until one day your hands would start to turn dead blue and your body would grow gnarled and small. The doctor would find that one of the brambles got caught in the left vertical of your heart. You rot from the inside out. I’d sell purified salt and the world would feel dowsed in ***** lake water until it didn’t and I moved on because that’s what people do. Or someone would say “I never thought you’d end up with someone like her” and I’d laugh and say “me neither” and you’d kiss me. But you wouldn’t stop thinking about it until you ****** the brunette on the third floor and let her borrow my lingerie. You’d say “I’m sorry, I love you” and I’d burn the lingerie and then **** your best friend on our bed and we’d both end up shattered shells in a desert. We’d drown in ethanol. Or you’d get angry and hit me one day and apologize and I’d say it’s alright and try to fix you and end up spending a decade losing myself until I became a hollow porcelain bird on the shelf in your living room and our children would have to glue me back together. Or I'd realize you weren’t very intelligent and thought too much about nothing and that glow was really just sweat. I’d tell you’d I’d changed and we just didn’t want the same things, but really I’d just realized I was in love with a poem I made up and you were really quite a bore and saw the world in varying shades of brown. All those flowers in my ears would wilt and my skin would be a the moldy green of oxidized bronze. The day dream always ends in a corner with gaping hole in the floor and toes on the precipice.

People want soft and warm, supple skin and sunflower eyes, but my fingertips are always cold and I always manage to dredge up something gray in sunshine. People want thick sweet corn syrup and honey, but I am watered down *****, not strong enough to stimulate the slightest rise in temperature but just enough to leave the lingering taste of rubbing alcohol.