This must be what they mean by growing up.
Skin worn with boyish charm,
but I feel old in my bones.
The holes in my marrow house stagnant air;
echoes of unheard words
and half-forgotten dreams
keyhole-peek through hairline fractures.

There must be something in the wind,
the way the dust is kicked up from
the soles of our shoes
to dance with the last night’s
idle bedtime prayers,
and find intimacy with dew
that will never fall out of love with grass.

We said,
Black out the lights so that I can
catch my breath again…
and we looked for shade under rootless trees
and couldn’t quite decide whether the night sky
was everything our grandfathers made believe
in stories that smelled like cigar smoke
and typewriter ink,
or if it was nothing more than
card stock and pinholes.

And as the footsteps that find comfort in concrete
step over our flickering, kerosene city lights,
We hummed hymns into the
crevices of our collarbones
and serenaded the sky with
our songs of sin.
They interpreted the tip-toeing crescendos
for the hearsay of rats
and the cricket gospel of violin legs.

But what they never understood is that
I came clean with careful lungs.
Listen,
the air was a draft drawn through
an almost silent note of a harmonica,
*This Town is more fragile than a whisper.