I.
daffodils creep at the cusp of May
and your shadow glides beside them.
they want to know
why i do the things i do,
who casts the spell behind these symptoms.
they arouse with the purr of questions
and derail with the burn of exposure.
why do you leave through the front door
of even the most crowded bus
just to say "thank you" to the driver?
why are you crammed with receipts
when you are so afraid to spend?
why do you still drown in the cascades
of the one who did this to you?
why? i don't know why.
if i long for those places
punctuated with laughter,
why do i choose the last train car?



II.
we meet at a stairwell littered in the signs of a dying hour.
nothing.
you manufacture mysteries at the blinking of your eyes,
you unfold in sunny patterns at the dancing of your lips,
dangerous, but nurturing. yet still,
nothing.
i want to say that you are like a dream,
an assemblage of cells and concerns
into something more than what my reality can afford.
but instead, i only sigh, and you start to leave,
and you take your shadow with you,
your sleeve indulging in the gap swallowing mine.
nothing.
love, lust, loneliness--they are nothing
but the language of the human sigh.
the daffodils are nothing
but the symmetry i don't have access to.
May is nothing
but a crater behind April curtains.
and we are nothing but Pandora's pet,
the last on the list
of Aphrodite's errands --
a still life study of human beings.

light littering a space in which i wish to sleep.
April-eyed chance, February-born desire,
failure spun by March.
fragrant trees on a campus weekend,
no one there to enjoy them.
walking slowly, and overestimating.
you can always count on reality to rush.
multiple copies of a book, only one in use.
truth rounded with the smog of manners,
where risk and restriction struggle.
foretaste of feelings on Wednesday,
and all too soon, your Thursday words
bleached with Friday morning.

i suppose death, too, is painful,
but then i remember
what it means
to sustain.

to know what you never will.

to know envy for the pages fluent
in the warmth of your fingers.
never knowing, what it must be like
to interrupt the coolness of your glasses
against the silent flame of your skin.
to know about the hidden avenues in your hair,
my hands have dreams about crossing.

i suppose knowing is painful,
as it is to know
these breaths i withdraw
to lock you
in my language:

they are all so terribly useless.

your reflection joins mine in the window.
the world is sunbathing.
languid, glowing, lovely.

and i seem to have forgotten
it is already nighttime.

tuesday. the sky, a violent blue:
even the clouds begin to sigh.

a grim sort of heaven cascading—
uninvited, expected—into our negative space.

it says, youth is poison.

youth is the colour of a forest fire.

the small of my back retains the warmth from before
and i am thinking, for us both: the misery of a body.

the late afternoon exudes with such tragedy
that our words can hardly contain them.

in daylight
i consume,
by nighttime
am consumed.

on the cliff, breathing the nighttime fog coating last
february, where the world was upside down, all
those stars collected under our shoes: there the gravity
around you began to change shape. the moon
already knew this would happen, yet she warned me
of nothing and instead she wept. it was not the stars
who shamed her crescent, but the smile i wore beside you.

in her waxing and waning, i told her many things
about you, the moon listened and later forgave
as my smiles were shadowed by heartache. oh, but
had she been the sun watching the warm pool
of mornings where you were there with me,
i would have been left especially lonely.

the moon repeats you, i cannot see her right now.
we have spoken little in winter, still i look up, i am
at a place where the world is upside down: here
the stars are as uncommon as she is, instead i explore
her glass ocean. i cannot see her right now, but at
last her voice is here to shield me from drowning. she
says, “it has been many a month since i have last seen
that shadowed smile you are wearing, but it is for your sake,
and for the sake of the stars, that i hope it is your last.”

we’re not too sure about these people
we’ve become, minimalists in deliverance
but gluttons in our feeling—protecting our
belongings but not really protecting them
at all, while yielding ourselves to those
people who join us on our train home.
though we might confess, in hesitance, how we were
moved to tears by the man in the window seat
who ignored his reflection as we rode through
a tunnel, how we suddenly began to crave
bare flesh when the hood of her jacket barely
blessed our shoulder, and even how we swore
we saw the outcome of our lives as we were
stung by the eyes of a stranger—we quietly crave
this power to distort somebody. it is a language
we are already fluent in, yet we all dream about
how great it must be, to be able to adjust
sentiment purely by thinking or touching.