oranges

Boy, I wonder where you wander (soft steps, heavy breath) when your icy eyes cloud.  To harrowing depths you descend, sinking for a minute, a fevered hour; shadows and phantoms, what woes reside in this world where you hide.  A stranger (masked, horrifying) incubates inside your skull and sometimes you talk to it, let it play with your muscles, tighten in your fingertips until you slip with shuddering vision and the lightest of heads.  It is all secrets and silence down there; it is not real life, but it is where you choose to live.

And how you push.  All I want is your soft skin and the adventure you once let me borrow.  How we used to play, painted faces, starving minds, we smiled so wide for our camera lenses, a filter and a post.  We walked around in starry circles, tickling the night skies, delighting the dewy grasses.  I wanted to know everything and you wanted to tell me; words fell from our cracked lips as quickly as kisses and we gathered them up and wrapped them in wire and saved them for our rainy days, even though there were none.

I kept telling myself to leap like a flame from my window; the earth and the ethers, your face in my head, my beats paired with yours and I could not, I could not leave you.  Perhaps you are just a rough and tumbled soul, a skinny sapient gambling life and death on a plastered, powdered table.  Or perhaps you are the meanness I hoped could not exist, foolish and selfish, you throw it all away for hours of ephemeral pleasure.  Drain it, drink it, if you can't smoke it, snort it; you work your whole life to keep up, you work everyday to keep your thoughts down.

Boy you were the toughest of loves; a darkness one moment, a tulip the next, rash, mercurial, you and I caught laughing and crying and scraping our knees on a see-saw.  And all I wanted was your soft skin, oiled and inked, and to roll around on your cowboy bed (how bohemian, how bold) with itchy noses and languid limbs, and to run through the soupy gloom, fingers interlaced, our insides all fire and all snow.  I wanted you for two short months.  And I suppose I got what I wanted.