Santa Monica
grew seas of
fragile poppies
on these arms,
ones that crave
the embrace of
salted winds
and the
coastal
lick.
I return
to where the grains
do lie,
to where these
bones have settled
in their places:
rooted like the
flowers.
I desired
a word
with you,
but I
came
at you
in tongues.
I looked then,
to my
fingers:
hoarse,
gasping
every
syllable.
The prosecco giggles
again at the primal scene,
where it once tasted
sweeter in dry pairs
yet now remains eclipsed
as a maimed sunset
of stale half-lights.
The mud spoke to me
in a cool dialect,
and I lay soaked
like thirsty rice paper
because I was parchment
written into being
as the scrolls he
used to recite by
the roots of his heart.
My anguish lashing,
I feel the rain coarsen
as the seconds cement
into histories that will
carve itself into
my face in time:
whispered like leaves
scratching across
the dark
full of fireflies.
Swiftest is his hand,
raw and crying for salts,
that corrals with crimson
the feral night-fevers
lancing through him,
and whether he may be
burning for sooth,
or forcing Hell into
three-lined stanzas,
there are no masterpieces
to be written
in cooling waters.
I feel my scalp,
glazed with sweat,
scalded by memory:
there were pillars
that fell that day when
clouds were rising
like fresh loaves
and the sun
had given us
the kisses
that are often
exhaled yet
left to spider
away unsaid.
You are to me
as the frayed
whiskers
of the storm
that my bones
did feel
yet discounted:
little will you
know of my
half-naked shouts
that leave me
gasping
for breath against
the wetness
of the trees,
mute and
illiterate.
He hailed me like a cab,
brusque with a certain
heavy-handedness,
that surrendered me later
to the soggy gravity of
being thrust curbside
with parchment arms
full of boxes pregnant
with orphaned trinkets
left to mingle in the
deadspace of our
garret.
Lightning scalped
the smog from
flat tops crunchy
with concrete crusts,
and I huddled beneath
the awning with the
ever-flickering lights,
as I fingered the keypad
for his voice so dry.
Sunset hunter,
(one of your
enveloping epithets)
for I stopped to watch
the dusk against your jaw
break like strokes of a
child’s handwriting.
Childish was I to
envy the dying day,
decrepit with
color and bloom,
but I, suffused
with creeping jasmine,
could not kiss nearly
with such ferocity.
