Days becalmed, stormy nights
Driving through a thuderstorm,
collecting raindrops from the smoky yellow clouds.
Picking up the piece of your life is not always being kicked in the stomach,
thrown down on a bloody battlefield;
sometimes it is Hansel and Gretel,
molding little dropped breadcrumbs into misshapen gingerbread creatures.
The water runs scattershot down the glass, peeling bits of rainbow from the sky.
I barely remember a time when I didn't know you.
You were so all-consuming, so easy to get lost in.
Thick rolls of thunder hang low on the horizon,
and the air is cool.
Being in your arms was being lost in an overgrown forest.
Everywhere I looked was a bramble, a tangle, another organic puzzle to hack through.
The wind whips up in a dusty fury;
the taste of metal coats my tongue and seeps into my pores.
We never sought to fill each other, not to become one;
it was all we could go to just overlap, by the slightest slivers.
The dashboard is caked with footprints and sunstains,
the upholstery rusty from mem'ry.
Do you remember what I looked like while I walked away?
I don't.
I don't remember a thing,
barely even a face or a freckle.
Even the scars are fading;
the literal scars, the blotchy red and white marks
are sliding off my skin and leaving a whispery trailing wake.
It frightens and thrills, both at once.
I now have only words,
and even those are so old they have turned to rust.
The color in the sky begins to bleed,
to run and collide in vast chunks
and tear clouds down like earthquake plates.
Once, ages ago,
as the stars nudged into sight,
I heaved myself through an open window
and into your waiting arms.
That is all I can recall.
That, and the nights underwater,
kept alive by each others' breath and nothing more.
Thunder strikes a bold pattern behind sheets of lightning,
curling like lost wooden wisps floating above a bonfire.
Illumination sears and rends,
leaping from tree to tree and car to car.
God, what a paralytic you were.
The slightest glance, a silent exhalation,
and I froze like prey,
neurons snapping and crystallizing;
a half-formed spiderweb caught
in unseasonal frost.
To touch we had to break entire castles,
lay siege for weeks and months,
but your golden stones were all I could ponder.
I yearned, and ached,
and longed into frenzied fatigue.
I always came when you called.
collecting raindrops from the smoky yellow clouds.
Picking up the piece of your life is not always being kicked in the stomach,
thrown down on a bloody battlefield;
sometimes it is Hansel and Gretel,
molding little dropped breadcrumbs into misshapen gingerbread creatures.
The water runs scattershot down the glass, peeling bits of rainbow from the sky.
I barely remember a time when I didn't know you.
You were so all-consuming, so easy to get lost in.
Thick rolls of thunder hang low on the horizon,
and the air is cool.
Being in your arms was being lost in an overgrown forest.
Everywhere I looked was a bramble, a tangle, another organic puzzle to hack through.
The wind whips up in a dusty fury;
the taste of metal coats my tongue and seeps into my pores.
We never sought to fill each other, not to become one;
it was all we could go to just overlap, by the slightest slivers.
The dashboard is caked with footprints and sunstains,
the upholstery rusty from mem'ry.
Do you remember what I looked like while I walked away?
I don't.
I don't remember a thing,
barely even a face or a freckle.
Even the scars are fading;
the literal scars, the blotchy red and white marks
are sliding off my skin and leaving a whispery trailing wake.
It frightens and thrills, both at once.
I now have only words,
and even those are so old they have turned to rust.
The color in the sky begins to bleed,
to run and collide in vast chunks
and tear clouds down like earthquake plates.
Once, ages ago,
as the stars nudged into sight,
I heaved myself through an open window
and into your waiting arms.
That is all I can recall.
That, and the nights underwater,
kept alive by each others' breath and nothing more.
Thunder strikes a bold pattern behind sheets of lightning,
curling like lost wooden wisps floating above a bonfire.
Illumination sears and rends,
leaping from tree to tree and car to car.
God, what a paralytic you were.
The slightest glance, a silent exhalation,
and I froze like prey,
neurons snapping and crystallizing;
a half-formed spiderweb caught
in unseasonal frost.
To touch we had to break entire castles,
lay siege for weeks and months,
but your golden stones were all I could ponder.
I yearned, and ached,
and longed into frenzied fatigue.
I always came when you called.