the sunwarmed stone singes the long-dormant nerves in my adult fingers and suddenly I
remember what pear trees used to smell like in June,
as backyard swing rope burns emerge on my inner thighs underneath my slacks
and sweat cooled by dusk on the back of my neck.

the heat accumulated over years of summers
is my loss of virginity too, and I realize now that pear trees
in August smell like ***,
like sweat and shame.

there is a handful of jolly ranchers and pack of cigarettes
on his bedside table,
to which, afterwards, he says, "take what you want"
and I wish that I could as freely as he took me,
but I am no longer angry at men for this because
I know I could just as easily have done the same.

we all have to decay somehow,
after the pleasure like candy we take from each other
and **** out of the earth to consume in glut,
and after suffocating each other with our selfishness --
what more appropriate fate than sugar and smoke?

so hesitantly I take one of each to his balcony and do my penance,
and hear him come up behind me to take my hips into his palms
and when I feel sick I think about my mother's pear tree,
despite its history and crimes still flowering every spring.

I want to exist in a way that floods my capillaries with
the silver sparkling sea foam that erupts out of the sky-colored lake
and fizzles out like I do,
like I will.

take me with you,
seagulls and woman in bohemian jewelry
and billowing brown—

I want to exist in a way that I will never.

until my palms can absorb crocuses,
crumble into sand and soil for them to grow networks of roots
in my bloodstream, I will cry by the water
and every time

I see men with white beards and squinted blue eyes riding bicycles,
years swirling behind them as they pass because
they already know how to live,
how to accumulate life distilled from tumult.

it is too much for my drying throat to hear the orchestra
without being able to drink its dripping scarlet passion,
to nourish myself with it,

but I could not live without the smell of music.

I don’t know what I came to do here,
so take me with you,
ocean and seagulls and bohemian woman and old men on bicycles with secrets, and
take me with you, violins, in a way that you cannot,
nor that I can even describe to you.

I have a body with purple crushed fingernails,
with burn scars and with joints secured by bolts.
I find soot and oil behind my knees
and in the creases of my sunburnt elbows,
and I tuck it underneath my tongue for nourishment,
paint black the fleshy bottom of my mouth.

In the daylight we work,
in the moonlight we drink and stumble to bed spinning.
We wash our hands in gasoline
and our faces with dirt and kiss our women goodnight.

But coated in whiskey and grime and spit from the mouths of mechanics and truckers and anyone else who wanted me,
my tongue is drunk and slowed but still refuses to forget what it is.
I am, unfortunately, a body that courses with concertos of amber glowing cobblestone and morning sunlight sparkling blue and sprawling green vineyards and everything unmarred and more vivid than life,
and my tongue knows I can only love things that taste like music.

we're all the same, aren't we?
beaming rainwater-soaked prayers through our windows into the cloudy cold twilight or the red morning,

reading underneath creamy lampshade light,
teakettle steam fogging up our wooden cabinet doors,
twinkling kitchen high hats like tiny constellations in a cosmos of homes...

I know that I am not alone in the way the boy sitting in the restaurant window shifted his weight onto his left leg and tucked it underneath him,
in how the girl in white sneakers hopped over the puddle in the sidewalk,
in coathooks and shoeracks and umbrellas and rubber boots,
in the things we have made to protect and aid ourselves against the rawness of the earth.

and I miss your home, your rusty pans in the sink and rough gray towels, your irish butter and frozen burritos in the fridge and nothing else,

but there are so many lives and so many mornings shared among them to comfort me; I am not alone--
we are all missing homes, love, and I am better knowing that I am only feeling what I am supposed to.

You and I would stand in front of my bathroom mirror and
just hold each other, naked, acquainting ourselves
with the strange, biblical union of joints and hair
and skin and crevices and curves that we make
together...

Fingerpainting reverently on your chest,
I'd kiss your freckled shoulder, eyeing your reflection as it melted,
falling for me again-- and you'd
tell me in return
that my eyes are beautiful, and that they are green,
just like yours.
They are brown, I'd say, and
laugh and
leave
you to
confront only yourself
in my mirror.

Every day that I stand again
in front of my mirror alone--
a similar but emptier amalgamation of joints and curves--
I could swear that my eyes
look a little bit paler...
like if I
point my nose up to the high hat on my ceiling,
with the fluorescent light spilling into them
the color could certainly pass
as the same green in your eyes and
I wonder,
and I hope

that being wrong all this time
doesn't mean I was wrong about you, too.

When we have stood, cold and raw, cracked open, underneath
the waterfall of time for long enough that
it doesn't burn our skin quite so much
anymore,
I hope that you can repair the heart I
tried to break as gently as I could.

I hope that you find a girl who has always wanted to
name her baby Cody,
who can ski like a demon and
take her liquor like a cowboy and
lives for Silverados and Colorado sunsets.

I hope that when you remember my laugh,
it doesn't sound quite so pretty as hers, and that
when you scoop her up from behind,
it will feel like you are doing it for the first time.

But when she sees you cry and
says she's so grateful to have a boy who knows how,
I hope you are reminded of all the love I gave
to help you learn.
When she hugs you and thanks you for listening,
I hope you remember the time I spent listening to you,
teaching you what it means to be heard.

The way that I love you is not a fake, flimsy kind of love that
floated away when I left you--- no,
I want your girl to be all the comfort and safety and warmth and devotion that I could never be to you...

And if she isn't,
I hope that she reminds you of me
enough to make you leave before
she breaks you again.

darling, I can still chart the precise geometry of your nose,
count the number of freckles underneath your thin green eyes,
delineate the lifecycle of the stubble on your cheeks,
and all I want is to come back home to you...

aren't you going to miss
the way I could slip your belt out from under you
with my eyes still swimming in yours
while you lay down, hot and panting in the dark?

who will caress your naked chest as tenderly as I have,
slide her hand up your shirt the way that makes you shiver
and kiss you everywhere like gentle rainfall,
warm and soft and fervent like poetry?

who will bandage the fall wounds
on your torn up knees and elbows
and wash your 22-year-old body like a baby in the bathtub
when you're so drunk and tired you cannot stand?

who will stroke your hair as you sleep with one leg bent in her bed and
scratch the back of your neck and
hold you close to calm your racing heartbeat and
remember the pills you take at night and where you keep your contact lenses and all your family stories and buy you Tylenol and your favorite Gatorade when you're sick and never,
ever,
ever leave
you the way that
I did
?

that morning, I was woken up by the beating of your chest
against mine.
it was faster and that meant you were awake,
my love, my darling,
you were
awake and thinking and moving again,
no longer just your soft, comfortable, sleeping body,
and I cried in your arms because I knew that
it was time to leave home.