I accidentally filled her mind
with serenading cicadas
that erupted on El Dia De Los Muertos,
a piñata swarm of insects,
their nightmarish candy forms
eating away all the love in the universe,
splitting me into two broken halves,
heart snapping like the thunderous crack
of the lumberjack’s axe.

(Echoes, echoes reverberate
through a forest we used to call home,
where her eyes would blink like fireflies in the night,
where the alluring tug of her voice
would spin silky illusions of kaleidoscopic renewal.)

Butterfly wings full of peering eyes,
the precious gift of true sight given then taken,
the other half of me struggling
through the encroaching amber of a parallel world,
crawling like a lonesome ladybug down the trunk of tree,
oblivious to gravity in some small,
dainty way.

Smiles are everything I so long to be,
and they stretched out like infinity’s caress
as I felt the slow thirsty dance of her vivacious mind,
that juke joint of the soul,
ripe fruit underneath mistletoe,
kissing me like it might put out
all the fires burning across the land,
like we were the last match in a galactic cave of darkness,
the hope of all mankind boiled down
to a single, fiery instant.

The tantalizing flow of her heart dress
seemed to yearn for a more intimate glimpse
of this strange bag of quarks:
the tattered remnants of my fallible,
damaged soul,
a laughable patchwork of everything under the sun that means to be human,
a lumbering fusion doing a cadaverous macarena
across the slippery linoleum of the universe;
yet the sound of a soul bifurcating
into both midnight and noon can deafen eardrums
and dry up the most passionate waterways,
sending even the most beautiful rainbows of delicate intention to an early grave.