We were seedlings when you thought we were the brush.
As bruised as my ego was, I mistakenly took you to bethe truth for the moment, my day at a time formula
prescribed for those landscapes in my mind where you
had yet to exist. The plates have shifted, and so comes
the smiling mouth, churning like a hot gyre, grounding
the coffee bean, and the iron ore. Hilltops exploded
into a background of hate; the kind where dissipating
clouds overcast a sun soaked skin -not yours nor mine.
The leaves and berries were torn from their branches,
bark stripped from its perennial core. Those roots
we knew would take us days to excavate came up without
great effort -their sprawling veins dropped, lifeless
as hair upon a shoulder. A liquidification of soft
spots -spots that were lighted by lamps: tunnels of
dark-room door-ways, and naked men and women melting
into the developer, waiting for their portraits to appear.
Falling trees, barely falling, but lifting upwards
toward the gaping hole in my head pried with your arm
around any good Christian man, praying to God that he
gets you into your full size bed by the time two a.m.
comes around. He's late, we can't wait much longer.
He's late we can't wait much longer. We must hurry.
When we were made we were set apart. I, in the corner
of a hotel lobby. You, near the edge of a cliff with
burning bodies at the bottom of its cape. I let the
bad parts in, and they obliterated your joints,
your pristine landscape. You firefly, never again.
(Never Again)
