Slick

Your mouth tells me no but your eyes tell me nothing short of volumes, too high for my fingers to reach. Bend down a little and I'll  try again but the last time I stretched I tripped on my own arrogance.

Did it hurt? When you fell off your father's lap and snagged your eyelid on his father's funeral and you finally realized what the Circle of Life had in store for its tenants?

You know, you must be Jamaican. Because I reached back into your past lives, six generations previous to this conversation and your skin is six shades darker and your smile six inches wider than right now. As if I'm counting. But I'm counting.

Roses are red, and I've never seen a violet because my vision was always much too blurred by the bottle to write decent poetry. What a shame. I could have been something worth toasting.

You've got more curves than a racetrack and a better bust than a T.V cop but I was never one for entertainment anyway so put your sweater back on.

Whore.

Given

The city moves her as she moves through it. She peers out of her window and wonders if the symphony below strikes everyone the way it strikes her. On the outside we both know how much is destroyed in the city every night. We both know how many children sleep in between the cracks in the sidewalk and how many stray dogs will never see the sun again.  But as morning rears its face, the city sings nothing but life, life, life. The first bus horn is a rooster's crow, hurling the contents of the city into the sunrise. Her living, breathing presence sits comfortably inside the city's own living, breathing presence. The city saves her. It disables the clock-like barrage of poisonous thoughts which are so often wedging themselves into the lobes of her brain. The days can turn on a dime. Her emotional output is a like cat - perfectly content and relaxed right up until the moment it bolts from the room in a panic.

This is a stupid joke at best, a caricature, a satire, a condom unrolling over a banana in sex ed. This is the slow, dawning realization that this is not love, or even a cousin. Not infatuation, or lust, or even extended respect. This was something... else. Something I did not fully understand but would carry me in its arms just the same. What a beautiful loophole I'm living.

Runoff

The days go by in a steady cadence, like a heartbeat, or a horror film. They seem redundant and unnecessary only because you are absent from them. I'm jealous of the people who pass you in the streets, who sit behind you in class, who walk by you in the gym. They get to see you living your life, just being a person. And they can note your beauty, passively - file you away in their mental archive for the day. They don't have to hang on to your image in a panic like I do when I'm not sure when I'll get to do it again. That is fate's cruelty. My afternoons are pools filled with whatever makes up your blue, blue eyes, but I still come home parched every night. No wonder, when you've got a face like the sea and I've got a heart like a sponge.

And if I could jump into your pond for one second, I wouldn't even try to hold my head above the surface; I would just learn to breathe underwater. But right now I'm out of breath when yours gets deeper and deeper as you fall into a comatose sleep after dark. My thoughts speak with yours long after our mouths fall asleep. We clench sleep like soap suds in wet fingers. Every night is too slippery to hang on to. And if someone were to listen to me talk in my sleep all they would hear is the slow trickle of your name. Me, as I pull you out from your cataloged file, water-marked "My Favorite Daydream". What we have here is the universe's express consent and now I get to see your face alongside the sunshine every morning.

And if there is a God, then He watches us, scotch in His grimaced hand, with palpable envy.

Before You Sleep,

You are not as terrible as you think you are. When you told me how you deal with things, that you just get through it, that you tread water for a short time and keep your eyes off the future, I thought it was brilliant - the perfect concoction of distraction and short-term self-discipline. As long as you don't look out the window at WWIII, it's not happening. What luck have you fallen into, that you begin your journey with the same coping mechanism that the veterans learn to adopt? But it comes with one fatal flaw: you keep your eyes on your shoes so long you fail to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

You fail to see yourself as I do. You miss the beautiful wide-angle shot. You don't see a birthday cake with 28 candles on it. You don't see a birthday cake with 29. I see a few years in your eyes, five more in your words, a whole decade in your smile. Your strong hands grip at least twenty years, even though you don't notice. I see eons of time. You don't see the children and the warmth and the Christmas stockings. I refuse to accept your hypothesis about dying childless because your genes are too beautiful to waste. If life continues after your extinction, it will be that much worse for the world. You don't know that your heartbeat is so much louder than the gunshot fired through your consciousness each morning. You're the last copy of a book in a burning library, and I'm not fucking strong enough to yank the fire alarm. I regret to tell you that my mother only prepared me for visible wounds. You think you dug this hole and pushed me into it, but let me tell you how sweet the soil is at the bottom.

Recess

If all my elementary school teachers came out with a catchy tune about my competence:

Everyone else heard the directions, so
You're a liar
And I don't tolerate liars.
Why can't you be more like
The others had no problem listening to
Don't touch that,
No talking,
Sit down, and
Do you think you're better than
My instructions were quite clear.
There's no reason to
Go and think about
What do you think you're doing.
Ma'am we think there's something wrong with
You can't do that.
I don't know why you find it so difficult to
You're irritating me now.

Continuity

Follow my explicit instructions when you notice me getting old. Please don't miss a step. I want you to see years in my spine, crooked and chinked from use, and I want you to find a decade between my brittle fingers, shrunken from pinpoint labor, and I want you to grasp at how long my eyes have in them, wrinkled at the corners from their continuous cross-hair tasks. When you discover my age, wipe it clean with your Windex of a knowing glance. See beneath the time wrapped into my skin, stretching farther than from here to Minneapolis. Read the small messages embedded in there.

Can you decipher them? They say that you're not as terrible as you think you are, and that you drive too fast, and that I'm really really sorry for picking you up late from that flight last October, but mostly sorry to myself because I wanted to see you so badly prior.

Know that when I get old I won't mind looking this way. Know that I'll only mind that I can't see you as well, or hear your lovely voice quite as clearly. Remember that when I'm slow to reach you, it's not for lack of trying but for lack of strength. Keep in mind that my scarred hands don't stop me from feeling how warm your eyes are during the holidays.

There's not a lot of time to say all this during a car crash, when our bones are fracturing from the screeching metal instead of old age. But I would have said it. I would have said it if our young lives weren't being cut so short.

Growth Spurt

She posts the most inappropriate pictures on instagram,
And boys comment on them
So sexually.
And she's like...
"Thank you"

The dawn of the modern compliment.
Lukewarm, easy intimacy.
All the wrong flattery.
The stomach of an adult through the eyes of a child.

Have we reached the distant point
Where
In a stupid, feeble attempt to eradicate awkward moments,
Everything is acceptable?

Everything is not acceptable.
Only some things are acceptable.
And she can't tell the difference.
And it kills me.