I'm losing to the wind; he knows
I need his wayward rushing gusts
and I love the way he puts
my hair in my mouth and
air in my chest.
His spirit gently roars,
tangling my words and
bringing me to my knees.
He carefully envelops
past, present, and future; a
tornado deftly encircling
everything I've ever known.
There’s something ethereal
in the way
gravity shies from his gale
and how he artfully folds rhythm
into my breaths.
I wish I could love him with
even an inch of the miles he
spans, but
until I learn to fly I’ll
lower my windows and
fill my lungs.

because the night burns heavy
like tears hugging
the back of my eyes,
and the seconds run electric
like air buzzing
in the space between your fingers.
Rosy I-love-yous
turn to quick to
thorny goodbyes
stuck scratching my throat
as my lips fight fate.
Give me breath again
show me we were never happy happenstance,
string my soul out into
baskets woven holy
for the sanctity of us.
Drive slow
buy me time to pray
that we are eternal beings,
unbound from time, able to see
beyond seven colors to someday.
But maybe
in the end it doesn’t
matter how slow you drive, because
even after you leave, I’m there
in your car
always, every moment
in memory.

I say,
hoping it’s too quiet for you to hear,
but you do
and with one hand,
you press your finger to my lips,
and with the other, you
give me everything I
do not have the words to
ask for.

I’ve got a habit of
splintering my mistakes
and strapping them to your bedroom ceiling
in self-pitiful stucco style,
where they glare at me
like waking nightmares and
strip me of the sainthood
with which you clothe me.
I fill our little boat
with my buckets of vice,
submerging us in overshared sob stories -
but somehow you are
breath, underwater, always
you are soap
washing my hands and
kissing my fingers
using yours to brush burning tears
from my cheeks.
Your forgiveness
glues my lips shut
as I desperately try to justify
my self-perception, leaving me with
no choice but to return
each precious favor.

Your mind is the bed
of an Elysian river
of thought
and when acid rain came, you
built dams to punish yourself
by keeping that toxic water
from ever
flowing out
to sea.
I may not know how
to break through your walls, but I’ll
sit on these banks
shedding a tear for each
polluted drop of rain
until, perhaps, one day my
Hope will
run your
waters pure.

I.
Pink light
cascades in ribbons from the tank
to land surreptitiously
across our faces. Its glow
hides the creeping blush
rising in my cheeks
as I notice, in the glass,
your rippling reflection
staring at me.
So I try not to smile,
holding our gazes clandestine for
a minute longer, just to let
the jellyfish think that
we’re admiring them.

II.
From one eye,
a turtle studies the warm-blooded couple,
a girl, fingers cold
and a boy, palms sweating.
Their image bends and
warps; their muffled laughter
joins the glugging rhythm
of the pseudo-ocean.
Holding its breath, it settles into
a front-row seat
for its favorite exhibit.

III.
You point out a pair
of angelfish gliding blithely,
two lovers floating freely.
We were fish once,
you tell me.
Yet here we stand,
I reply,
with our feet stuck to the ground,
only able to dream of
breathing underwater -
what kind of progress is that?
And you just smile,
silently tuck your arm
around my waist,
pull me closer
and wordlessly answer all of my
questions.

and I was supine
on the couch, with thoughts
flattening my chest, usurping
oxygen from my open mouth.
I watched a muscle
twitch in my leg,
the image bent through the lens of
an unbroken tear
and wondered if my body
was even my own.
Of all the things I
must accept
that I cannot control,
my body will always
be the most difficult.