We have promised that a kiss
Is forbidden
A line not crossed
But this kiss is there
Wanting behind our eyes
To be realized
As we steal a third
Embrace

I watch your pulse rhythmically beat against your skin
as you try to sleep
As we press through the bustling traffic
Sing-song horns bleating a cacophony of sound through the saris, and passu, and dogos along this dusty road
I feel at home here finding your stillness in this chaos.
Alive for once in so many years. Among these crumbling buildings and foreign tongues
The call of adventure and intrigue a constant whisper in my ear.

What the hell are we doing
In your dream?

I can hardly catch my breath
My skin is flushed
Wake up
Or don’t
But I know somehow
That this is the moment
As you stretch out
under those covers
This is the moment I can feel
Myself beside you

I am burning too **** hot
Like that last day in our city
Where it was just too hot to touch you
No matter how much I wanted to

I do not know
If you are in my dreams
Or I am living in yours

I do know
you are constant

I do know
this thin veil
this gray line
That separates time and space
And us
Is just a moment, a flash

My dawn
Your dusk
the golden hours
Those few moments
When our worlds can melt together

But the in-between-times
This absence is deafening while I wake
And lures me as I try to sleep
I don’t know what begs me to your day
But I am pulled just the same

I reach out
hoping to get a taste of you
To hear your voice
To remember your skin
To see you smile

January River
Shoe shine boys scratch for coins
Favella slums scratched into mountainsides
Bullets tear through innocence
Beauty and pain seen
on either side of the street
Rio de Janeiro

Like this little Indian village
Born away from the river
We have to keep ourselves
Distant
Or else we will be swept away
As the water rises

Yet the water of our river
Is everything
It’s all I can do not to swim

When I only ever see the back of your cell phone
I think something is off
When you dress up to go to the store
I think something is off
When you can't wait to get out of the house alone
I think something is off
When you leave for work with 30 minutes to spare every day
I think something is off
When you jump out of bed, against your nature
I think something is off
When I see you hanging out in the laundry room on your phone
I think something is off
When you escape to another room when you get a message
I think something is off
When it looks like work just to touch me
I think something is off
When intimacy goes from 0-60 and screams back to 0 every few weeks
I think something is off
When I realize I am the only one initiating anything physical
I think something is off 

When you get me to believe that it's all in my head after you tell me to open up
I know

It is an interesting day
I looked in the mirror
And almost saw myself
Finding myself
Returning to the books
Long forgotten
Stale
Rekindled memory
Of carrying these treasures
From place to place
I have more to find
But I’m all in here
Somewhere

Like Proust’s involuntarily memories
I often come back anew
A scent of flowers on a summer breeze
And I am again awash in you
As Pamuk would say
I want to visit the country of your imagination

Rising sun
Land of uniformity
Conformity
Doing the collective thing
Walking in in streams of drones
Walking out a little less than
The train is full
Of similarity
Suit and tie
Looking down at freedom
On a little screen

No more traditions
Just the grind until
The break