i tell people that you have an impossibly calming effect on my mind’s eye, that i love how your words are blankets around my unsteady existence, but in truth loving you is far more than stillness in my head, it’s more like a sky full of eyes watching the way i’ve grown onto you like lichen, rooting myself and hardening like wax around your spine every time we hold each other a bit too long; like brewing oleander tea in your mouth and happily taking sip after sip in hopes that you will one day **** me with your kisses; it’s not always a soft codeine high but more often my own head screaming at itself: this is it, this is love, true happiness, you can’t have it, you can never have it -- the future is uncertain and i drift endlessly on; i am sand, i am opinion, ever-changing -- loving you is like shooting stars falling to earth in the form of crystals cracking onto sacred seas of mirrors, like teeth and gold and black bedsheets that explode into crow’s wings, like my bones have been off-kilter in my body since the moment the first words you said to me fell from your lips and pooled in my ears, like your kisses are lies but my dread is real; it feels like the still-warm skin, the still-warm skin that knows, knows about her, the still-warm skin that will tell everyone you know; the sun hides from view so the clouds can have me now; but your voice triggers flint flickers ears ringing teeth click, sky-eyes shut tight and i am impossibly calmed by you once again