The Shorts and Long Of It

Even in the heat the rain feels cool on my skin, like your touch, it’s a dichotomy. The sky cracks and my shoes squeak, I walk slower. I turn up my face and close my eyes, senselessly I walk through the parking lot. Thoughts of you weigh on my mind lightly, intermittently as warm raindrops

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 I am so close. I feel almost full. Just barely at capacity for love, love of the earth and its many wonders, love of my friends and their endless hope, love for those wretches that I have left and those yet to come, love for all these things and the possibility of a love I know not yet and cannot fathom. This is a teetering on drugless ecstasy and if I can fall forward I will float on clouds.

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 I think about the moment you held my hand under the table and smiled at me. To date I don’t think I’ve ever felt that much electricity, unless I can’t remember touching my tongue to a socket. We ate everything and talked about anything, we drank vodka and I didn’t even remember I had a cell phone much less look at it. I was lost with you and I still am every time I think of this moment. What changed? How did we untangle?

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 There’s something to be said for silence. A thought lingers in silence and changes like wisp of smoke waiting and wanting for the next sound to be made. The thought shifts to contemplate the silence and thus the silence becomes the thought.

The Same, More of Exactly the Same

You don’t get to come in here anymore, in fact you should have never been here to begin with, but you pushed in, opened doors with your smile and sweet, albeit few words. I was transfixed and fell under your spell, quickly. You had to have known, had to have seen as I fell, floated beneath you. Everyone said don’t go, it’s slippery down there but I went and I slid and slipped and now, now your smile still transfixes me in a way that makes me cry when I get home. Along the way I lost my power and as I grapple to climb out of this muck, every time I hear from you I fall a little deeper. Sinking slowly into the quicksand of unrequited like. I try to stand on the shoulders of others that mean little to nothing just to feel closer to you. I’m sure you don’t notice, you shouldn’t, for I am not alone in this quest. I am not the first and will certainly not be the last in this abyss of warm memories that you have all but forgotten. I think back to a time where you rested your head on my stomach or stroked my leg as I packed to leave you in the early city fog. You broke me, broke into the chasm that I had kept locked so tightly. I had no intention of any of this to occur and here I use the same words to describe the same thing I said I would forgo weeks ago. Here the very same meanings are mixed and jumbled to describe the simplest of things; mild heartbreak. As if such a thing as heartbreak could ever be mild.

White Rabbits Out Of Hats

You just seemed like magic, but if the trick was to leave me covered in egg, you’re a smash. You came out of nowhere with this look of reserved abandon, an animal domesticated to the ways of city life. Something bubbled underneath your skin, rippled even, at the places a body ought ripple, but few words exuded your lips. A touch here, and mild antidote there and you had me falling, following you down to the deepest depths of a fairy tale. You smelled of familiar drugs and I wanted to taste every inch, go back to old memories of losing myself for the sake of finding myself. I thought, “don’t quite let him get the recognition of these words, don’t yet let him get hold my heart, or what’s left of it.” But somehow here we are, just like those long lost wisps of choking smoke, you are at last long gone, feeling further away then you ever were close. And maybe its all made up in my mind, maybe its still sweet but just pulled a bit farther apart, maybe there is a hopefulness in your silence. But it is your silence that breaks me, incites a welling of tears, and in those brief moments I find either composure or soon remember the endless confusions that you have no fingerprint on and I lose. It should have been lighter, should have stayed the way I told everyone it was “just some fun,” but the more you pulled the more I pushed and chased and wanted for more of what you might not have even been giving. In your smile I melt and you give a look as if you know not what you do, and yet you must know, you must have always known that those glistening wild eyes would pull me in, pull me down before I could spin out of your reach and keep hold of my whittled composure.

Look Forward, Look Out

Sometimes it is as if I don’t even know you. In my own quest for elusiveness you are the one who eludes me. Like a steam in the desert you are there, all around me and yet nowhere at all. Fleeting pieces of your life rush past me like a subway train leaving hot air and everything tangled. I hear whispers of you in the dark of my room and the stark light of afternoon. You are everything to everyone and mine only in silence, behind cold closed doors. You push me away until you need me, then wonder where I have been. You answer with questions, inquire with answers, I follow blindly and we both grapple towards infinite fate. A true partnership scares you while I find fright in trust. There is a light at the end of this passage, but its so often a strobe and disorienting. When do we go back to racing through photo flares and dreams? How do we get to the future before its happening? This dream is a wish my heart has made but my mind, my often unreasonable rational is no Sandman, and these castles will be washed away come high tide.

Runaway

I want to runaway with you, the thought of it makes me brim with fear and excitement. The possibilities of adventure are endless: set sail, set fire, set match, swing set. Lets runaway and hide from the world. Lets travel to places where we can kiss in the streets and dance until dawn. The cinema of our tryst now kaleidoscopic, rich rainbows of the unknown envelope our every jump and twist of fate. Lets leave behind grays and find only crimsons, azures and emeralds. Bright pinks flash below depths of blues and neon yellows drench crisp white architecture. Lets runaway and forget this reality of dredge. Lets drink in salty waters and get drunk on warm romance. Lets not come up for air until we float away in clouds of rapture.