65

today my feelings ride me,
a big tired elephant in the circus of
the heavy things
doing the languid ballet in my brain, around you

one time you made me cry
because your kindness surpassed
whatever threshold I had established,
and another time you said
"one day, one day" and
"I think about your pale skin and dark hair"

if I ever made you cry
maybe it was because
when we used the word “love”
we were summoning different chemical arrangements;

mine are down by the dried river, cupping their hands
in the ghost of the stream
as it twists snakelike
towards the rumor of an ocean
whose waves gossip your arrangement,

gossip Light while my pain sleeps in me
like a second skeleton
beneath my textbook one.

I feel feverish draped over it,
like I’d rather drape
over any other thing, but

ancient memory of my own mortality
blooms before it realizes itself, it
feels like half my tombstone
is in my stomach,

growing like one of those rubber toys in water.

sometimes it pauses,
reflects on its growth
and apologizes to me
and it fucks off
and I imagine whatever it is that you imagine for me
and I bask there:

"one day, one day."

I think there’s a meteor shower peaking tonight
above and between us
and I bask there, in the whole sky,
I bask across the things between us,
I leave my second skeleton behind

and in leaving it behind I discipline it, I make it
subordinate to the minutes that precede its waiting secret,
as I wade in the preceding minutes that lend me my history.

it looks on in silence so as to not offend the wading,
so as to not alert me to the inevitable death that is my chaperone,

and I can mistake the silence as sacredness or respect
if it obscures the skeleton lovingly.

and if it is lovingly then how can I be mistaken
and if I know love, it is in the retreat of that prescient chaperone

it is in the way we fall down the same set of stairs,
stopping intermittently to achieve something mutually distracting
[love]

it is in the way we revel in that which is mutual,
as if it betrays to the skeleton the loveliest thing of all:

we all die
riding the same horse