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Dec 2012
When you’re asleep I sit in the light, studying your movements
When you’re asleep a sit in the dark, syncing my breathing with yours
When you’re asleep I lie next to you, drinking your mumbles, the sounds your stomach make, the smacking of your lips
When you’re asleep I lie awake

There is something so very special
about the perk in the curl of your eyelashes
the lifts and dimples of your cheeks
and the way your lips part like blossoming flowers in the spring
flush with pale pink color that I draw my lips closer to touch

My worries dissolve like the flutter of your eyes
as you leave our world together and travel off to your own
maybe I can visit you there, but it doesn’t truly matter
I’ve elected to stay behind with the other half of you.
And it stays so very charming, when its fingers—your fingers
wrap themselves around mine when my hands reach for yours.

Why is there something so securing, so beautiful, and so safe
about being in a tide alongside someone who’s unconscious?
you’re hardly any good here, asleep, unaware of burdens round us
you can’t even fight the spider now crawling down the windowframe
you’ll never even know he was there, had I not been here with you
I’ll take care of it, darling, and you’ll never have to know
When you’re out and I’m still here I can rise, protect both of us.

Come on little spider,
oh please do not be afraid of me and this fateful kleenex tissue

Home fort is safe again. My focus is back onto you. And your lips.
And your nose. Is it even possible to admire someone this much?
A hair is poking out of it. Maybe two even. And yet you’re perfect.
Every trait of yours a detail on an exquisite piece of art. And god no it’s not your looks.

It’s your heart, really:
the one part of you that travels to both worlds.
By day it stays mine, loving me back as I try to hide my own
translating my affections into non-misheard obsessions
keeping me safe. And painting my world beautiful.
But at night it follows you, off to lands of magic and adventure
Painting your world full of color and light, even as you lie in the dark
Such a functionally simple *****. And yet somehow I’m alive in it.

This ending wasn’t meant to make sense.
Written by
JW Carter
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