i'm searching for the comfort of an old flame to keep me warm tonight knocking on familiar doorways to foyers where my boots have already rested dripping with snow or shedding beach sand and all i want is her the one i remember in bouts of photographs bright hair hidden in a knit olive colored snood with big blue eyes set on full power as we set out on the open road together car packed full of soft blankets groceries illicit drugs cigarettes and the fumes of santiago ***
she convinced me to quit smoking saying she hated kissing the marlboro man and i'll take you to the coast i said meaning every single one because i had harbored my love for her in a million ways of secrecy and only survived on a currency of torture pain inflicted pain withheld pain drugged away
she was absolutely perky for the first thousand miles hair haloed and face lost in shadow as we drove into the sun out of a cocoa beach condo leaving behind bikini squeals and smiles she was with me like an ethereal dream eating scones on the boardwalk beach in bitter cold new jersey and that night she was a long legged american girl astride me sweaty hollering in a secluded gazebo
she was a blur of parrot colors to me spending most of july dancing in a daffodil field in oklahoma while i changed tires on the hyundai her daddy bought one after another i just gave her the pink slip to my heart under a pavilion of light pink fractal fabric pitched on high beams ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows
she's sweetly ****** and surrounded by patchouli haze hanging off my back like a monkey wearing a wide high fashion soft brim hat she found before i surprised her with a bunch of freshly picked wild violets from the roadside she cripples me and we go tumbling wrinkled and aimless both exhaling plumes into the paisley purple sky already full of clouds blowing straight north hair tangled together full of windswept snarls barelegged now and writhing creating craved friction just two souls of pure energy on the loose
but the best memories i have of that trip are the nights we spent in joshua tree not-sleeping beneath a meteor shower every night for a week when her ***** was still running the show and i was just a poison rash itching her calf muscle before i became the master of myself we were a flurry mess of long naked limbs tuned to the exact same frequency
she was a fresh meadow flower naked under taupe corduroy overalls cut ragged into shorts walking with her arm twisted through mine and i thought i was the happiest man alive when we crashed in colorado for two weeks and every morning i woke to her incandescent hair sprawled lazy on the karastan rug under the turquoise glare of the television or to the smell of a gong sized breakfast casserole consisting solely of her dreams the previous night and i would kiss her good morning with her hair up in curlers and my face between her knees
but she started to grow wings in montana little nubs etched out on either side of her spine i noticed them one night while she was sleeping face down chest stretched across my chest i watched them grow the further south we got and by the time we reached the heartland under those glistening river cypresses or the banks of that great muddy river canopied by huge florida palms she was itching and molting them all over the car and she finally flew away from me said she was born for the city but i hope she's waking up now not under skyscrapers but a metropolis of oak strands governed by the tyrannical sun
and since that day i've painted her lips on every girl i've ever seen in the morning every face that emerges from indigo ambience is hers simply i hear her nothing-to-lose laugh in every fog or faint haze after every lunar prowl through a mushroom ranch by the coast my eyes get shined up with dew every time i find seagulls nesting in a cypress grove holding some kind of seance for the flash of sunlight off the nape of her neck in front of the watery green sunrise of the atlantic and in my teeth-grinding night terrors i have a hard-on and i can plainly see her dancing luxuriously on a deck stretched out over a shaded creek tight and smooth like the skin of a djembe drum
and sometimes when i feel very weird with something like sick stomach hunger churning in my gut i shave my ******* clean and trim my ***** hair into a crude cave-painting version of a mountain lion just for her i wade out into the sea passed the orange trees and wait for the moon or her lips to rise and lick me full on my face but she doesn't return my calls suddenly having phone trouble i guess