t-shirts in December and green bananas
(guess i'm in need of a tax break from the big bad economy of unpaid attention)
maybe I was the coward; the coward whose questions suffocated her mouth and who could not breathe the naked & trembling air
to wade through those warm wheat fields;
choose right for heaven, left for hell
un-hastened moments condensed by memories / dreaming of all those damned stars that trembled in the horizon as our bodies intertwined between the river, the roaming river, the cold rippling water passing through the tidepools that we kept stepping in accidentally, laughing as we watched the passersby shadows mingling with the shadows of that distant passing-by smoke, we lingered there in that moment,
it hurt to leave that place / but never so much as it will to return, never so much as a pang
/ an isolated and piercing ache within the deepest expanse of my chest, falling and forgetting everything but that cold december night when I learned who I was not ;
my thoughts are nauseating.
All I wanted was to surrender to a single gesture, something like a
hand / shake or a hand / hold
something so tender as cigarettes and sunshine and tequila before dawn;
(red mornings like red martinis)
then came that afternoon in April when I learned that
I was scared
and the fire tore through my guts.
I say fire because “fire” was the first and easiest word
that came to my mind later that evening
when I was trying to make sense of it all.
Not the fire that I always used to describe love,
not the frightening fire on the mountaintop when all you can see is smoke rising,
no,
a disarming fire,
a fire so benumbing and arresting and immobilizing,
something that could tear every living breath you’d hoped to never speak because your
heart is choking and your body is rotting
wish mama had warned me
about dancing with wolves
And there he WAS,
walking through that same doorway where he laid his tempered hands on tempered glass,
please please, why are you doing this
his temper like glass,
please tell me I thought I was wrong,
no, no—
And the sun, it wept upon my ashes,
dreaming of my repentance
and bones breaking those
glass panes until I slammed my head
upon that mirror and
began to peel my skin off,
loosened / unbound from flesh and skin and muscle and sinew,
from stitch and forgotten fabric and I could not think of anything to do at all
except reach skywards and wait for the wind to carry me to the dawning inferno