‘til you crept up my stairs
and stared at me as if I was
a butterfly landing on your
knee. And you, a flea

dancing in-between the hairs
on my head. I couldn’t shed
you off. You were growing
as Jack’s beanstalk. I hadn’t talked

to a man in years. I spend
my mornings hunched over my laptop
in a straight-back chair. My lines
are flat as the honeysuckle mat

at my front door. None step on
it. It’s quicksand. It ***** you in
and pulls you down into the dirt
cellar of all my troubles. And you’re

not a bottom dweller. No, you’re
a VP. I spilled myself over you,
as if I was perfumed powder snowing
on your shoes. But you were firmly fixed

as the cement poured on my sidewalk
and a house of bricks. Solid as the old oak
standing in my yard. Your face, the moon –
your eyes the stars.