Your name slides off my tongue
smoothly, sleekly
like velvet curtains
draping the dark stage
we stepped down from,
but I don’t recall the
sound of your name, I say.
It doesn’t stir up
any mornings of thickened
spring you speak of.
A mystery colours you
orange,
like a sphinx,
and you claim with tired smiles
that I have once
held onto you with
eagle claws,
breathing down
the scent of pressed roses
on new purple bruises,
you say, that I have often
attempted to fill up the
clear spaces of your eyes
with bubbled streams
of fantasies.
With my mind
like a slate wiped clean,
let us speculate
upon the past
once more,
and I imagine
your lips wet with fresh
summer rain, I imagine
clasped fingers
draining the little
remaining warmth of
our numb bodies,
our shadows lit with
fires from rumbling thunders
across blind lanes,
I imagine your whispers
shivering against my sleeve
with all its spilled tea stains,
careless kisses
lining the fringe of the
lack within.
Let us then slip into
our fifteen year old selves
stealing into balmy rooms
with my prison songs
and your guitar
making music and love
in the same rushed fervent breath,
you say.
You allow me to touch
this face I cannot place
until you ask about my long absence
and my make-believe
adolescent love
bleeds.
I blindfold your ready eyes
and escape through the window-
the city with its
dust trailing jaws
comes alive to take me in.
