they taste like toothpaste,
but you taste like birthday cake...

sometimes happiness and
I are right
there beside you
and when you turn to
look,
            we get bored and
                              leave

Shadow's fingers
making the contours of your
face breathe fire

Is there any reason why it
should feel so wholesome like
a warm kitchen smell ten
minutes before dinner
when your fingers seal off the
gaps between mine?

or why silence carries as much
meaning as the words
blinked from your mouth
while eyes seek eyes?

If time is a convincing illusion, then as I am writing this,
you are reading it; you are remembering me years after
we have spoken last, and I am noticing you for the first time.

I'm a young woman waking up in an apartment in Albany,
New York, realizing that I am finally broken enough to fix,
and an East Boston moppet in ***** pink overalls, riding
Big Wheels through the sprinklers with a boy named John Henry.

You're delivering newspapers on a cold New Hampshire morning.
I am falling asleep wondering if you could possibly love me.
You are saying that you do. You are stardust, and I am long gone.

Please, when you come, bring me news of the world –
not foreign wars or epic storms or the Queen's upcoming
Jubilee, but things that only you can tell – like this morning
smelled like mulch and mud; the slate was wet, and you thought of me.

Immediate aftermath of a storm:
dark roads marked wet;
air black, thick, stretched;
mud alive with thriving worms.

The morning next proceeding:
sky gray, fog higher;
streets appearing somehow whiter;
nature imbued with greenest green.