The French call an ******
"the little death"

looking at you,
(trace the curve of my neck
with your lips)

I would like to suggest-
(close your eyes and search
for the secrets of my body
with your tongue)

that is to say:
(put your hand in mine
don't let go.)

Darling,
let's die a little
tonight.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
We are tangled in the hope of night.
The lips of the milky way, creaming us,
Stains and is **** with a taste keening;
All is creation.  My meteors crash
Into your ruptured Earth.  I flame
Upon your must and moisted furrows
And my toes are locked, rooted in yours.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
In the deserts of the day you are true
Oasis.  The curves and waft of your sands
Seethe and sodden my barren plains,
Are erasing all my wandering memories
Of an endless sky and now your eyes
Are the only stars I know, and your skin;
A sheet that holds the heavens shimmering.

Body of ocean, milk and sky,
Your ******* are the heaving of grasses
And wind, loft and laden in the rounded
Hills, a hoard of ****** bread, bountiful,
Ripe and strange.  Your hair is an endless
Savannah, your valleys are gold and honeyed
With milk, seared, filled by my penetrating sun.
In passion we play; low on earth and deep in sky.

You changed your clothes
right there in front of me.
The dust no longer clinging to your skin
like little specks of angel dust
Smiles fading into harsh words and tears
whether there's an audience or not.
A love stained like the sleeves of my shirt,
mascara-streaked and frayed along the seams.
I still can't handle real life.
Those inbetween moments where you're in his bed.
Where you're writing love letters on Valentine's Day
even though you hate it.
Your broken boy is still in pieces at the bottom
of your toy chest. Voice warbled from dead batteries.

I'm spitting teeth onto the pavement.
Cracked grin cracked across my mouth
like your fist as it splits my lip again.
And again.
And again.
Ribs splitting from the laugh
that is echoing across the bricks
laid psuedo-symetrically like our
best-made plans.

In this corner weighing in at 115 pounds
we have the hopeless romantic.
All featherweight and bones.
All martyrish and faithful.

Black plastic nametag with white letters,
slightly off-white and not-so-flat from a trip or two through a bachelor's dryer.
I remove it from the bottom of the washer, lightly ******* the engraving,
and ask what's your middle name, this letter T?

From the kitchen you say, my grandmother named me,
with a private grin.
She might have been kinda drunk.
Walking behind me, your caramel-rich low voice soft in my ear,
TsuneoKawehiwehiokekuwahiwionouaioku'uhome.
(saying with careful pronunciation)
Tsu-nay-o-Ka-vay-hee-vay-hee-oh-kay-ku-va-hee-vee­-on-oh-vay-ee-o-ku-u-**-may
and I was just sent

No, she wasn't drunk, she knew exactly what she meant.
Kapunawahine, holding her little mo'opuna kāne,
sensed your father was restless with rock fever,
would be moving away to the mainland with her first grandson soon, so she says to you
*This land of water and rainforest trees of the mountains, Hawaii, will always be your beloved home.

In Ohio I order a pizza.  The menu says one of the items I can put on it is Mango.  That's curious.
I buy a Hawaiian mango at the new Supercenter Grocery Store, and the check-out girl asks
what's this? and I say it's a mango.  She says, no it's not, that's a mango, and points to the green pepper.

In Hawaii, I work at a farm, and pick some Lilikoi. A customer asks my co-worker if we have any passionfruit, and she says no. They ask me if lilikoi is like passionfruit and I say its dakine, but she's a visitor and doesn't understand, so I say, it's the same thing.

There's a Hawaiian family with a fruit stand; I like to trade the extra lilikoi for their really good mangos they grow, but the Hawaiian word is Manako.  Since they know I always want manako, I ask dakine?  They were out, so instead he asked you want some Apples?  I thought he meant those little red pears they call Mountain Apples and looked perplexed when I couldn't see any, so he picked up a clump of miniature bananas.  *Oh, yes I love Apple-bananas.

If you use me
as an anchor,
toss me off
the side of the ship
like little plastic rings
that ****** dolphins,
I'll sink into that cold,
that dark. Bubbles rising
to the surface, with each and every
pop you'll hear my last thoughts
as the pressure chokes the life from my lungs.