For her, it has been
The perfect birthday dinner.
Then he gets down on one knee.
A busy restaurant comes to a standstill.
Small beads of his sweat shine brilliantly;
The birthstones around her neck are green with envy.
Maybe a hundred eyeballs are
Making quiet squishing sounds in his direction.
A man is kneeling,
A woman is thinking,
And too many oysters are struggling to breathe their filth.
A star explodes as its gravity loses its struggle with kinetic energy.
Thoughts drive a brain to damage itself
Via a painfully gray zero-sum highway
Littered with roadkill:
Reasons to lose sleep-
Only to find it permanently.
The hummingbird, lonely,
Flutters above a lake, tries to kiss
The reflection of the moon on the water,
And drowns in her ignorant affection.
Someone, studying their own hands,
Realizes fingerprints
Are tiny maps of the earth.
Thousands of tiny honeycombs
Pour golden lava into the air,
Only to be collected by the wind.

~

Unaware of everything else that happened
In that moment,
The couple now stand
facing each other at dusk.
Facing a lifetime of seeing the world together.
Her smile reassures him.
Though he doesn’t know it,
When he’s old and gray, that smile
Will reassure him from every page of his scrapbook.
Several hundred eyeballs are fighting
A losing battle against
A storm’s surge;
There is a collective hum as fluttering hearts
In the crowd race to form a drum circle.
Summer’s warm breath wishes
Their sweat away, lifting
Nervous spirits.
They passively ride the emotive current
As the pair gift each other  
Forever.
As the pads of their fingers meet,
He is distracted by how the pearls in her ears
Catch the moonlight.
His bride leans in towards him
But in this moment,
He only wants to kiss her earrings.