Don't Rush

Something smells of honey suckles and bewilderment. I lay motionless under heavy blankets to quiet my mind, but it races on at a pace matched only by my heart. We could have been everything but our pasts and futures hold us in an unsolvable limbo. We hold a mirror to eachother, our reflections are not what we imagined they would be, like a fun house distortions waver; legs stretch with tales of something like truth, smiles are swirled into frowns. If I close my eyes to sleep will I find myself in that former dream scene? Will I wake up where we were a week ago and see you to the door before it goes any farther? Save myself the exhaustion? The drama? All the things I list when faced with questions regarding my loneliness. From this vantage point it's hard to say, hard to know. All I ever wanted was to look into your eyes at dusk, say nothing and yet everything at once.

Where Hearts Get Left

This is what San Francisco feels like when the fog rolls in after a hot day. The first flourishes of cold wisp against warmed skin, a heavy mist that feels like a spreading smile. The fondness grows and the late fall heat wave falls into infamous steam.

--

I want to wait with you at bus stops

I want to lean on you in the rain

I want you to be mine and me to be yours

I want everything, again

Follow me down steep stairways

Crash into heavy sheets

Run past familiar haunts

Trip down those winding streets

Take everything unbroken

Build new but with a simpler core

Laugh every single day

Make the stuffs of lore

--

The fog blows on now, rolling and rocking over green hills, whispering through pine trees, leaving sparkling condensation on these heavy rocks. The sidewalks slick, the streets slicker under taxi cab wheels, a great whir and swish about the city blankets our hearts and clouds most judgment.

And We Jump

We jump bravely into rolling waves to find little more than soft sand scraping our knees. We smile as salt-water sprays up, white foam gives way to clear blue and we are whole again. We bob as buoys, farther out than the child in us would want to be, we bob as buoys tied together and laugh. The soothing, the cajoling, the rolling rocking of each set pushes us in and yet back out again, time is kept by each wave’s peak and yet not kept at all. Push off rough pillows of sand and find a floating feeling not unlike walking on the moon. Jump and fall easily, smile, drip, with salt and laughter. 

The Brief Moments Wherein I Might Have Loved You

We became fast friends in one night and as I lay completely clothed between you and our mutual best friend I drunkenly dreamt, “ I could love him.”

I arranged for us to meet to play arcade games once a week. You taught me to shoot deer and as I cocked the plastic gun with one hand I glared, “I could love him.”

We drank into the wee hours of the morning until I fell on your bed and you ran around town with the clink of spray paint and laughter. Though the drunken mistiness I pondered, “I could love him.”

We rolled naked in sheets and thought no one would know that when I looked at you across the kitchen every cell was smiling, “I could love him.”

Adventure after adventure we fell into a common companionship, when I looked you were there, when I needed you were there and when I laughed you were there, but I never let myself love you completely. The arm’s length that I kept you at then pushed you further into, onto someone else stretched us too far. And now I love you and it’s too late.

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

 ------

 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.

 -----

 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?

 ------

 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.