Words upon Words

Organic (de)construction

Learning how to properly cut mangos was never
a problem.
Every five thirty in the morning,
I watched as your fingertips grasped a blade,
groped the fruit in one hand
and assembled it into a city-
a New York constructed
of pulpous daybreak iridescence
whose center was the Empire State of
ascorbic acids.

I would watch as your teeth
dismantled the neighborhoods,
razed each tiny scraper to its earth of skin,
and allowed the fragments
to slide in their saccharine juices
down your destructive
throat-
your lips curling at the view
of a sunlit plain ahead.

February 21, 2012

Cashmere

Though the rare cashmere of your skin
may embed itself in the sheets of another, I wish only
to wade my way through your cerebral seas,
allowing my body to drift endlessly through each distinct path
as though the currents of a mind could lead me to the sweetness
left ripe upon your tongue
or cheek.

Should the seas become troublesome,
I may build a dinghy upon which to sit
as I float through the fluids of your thoughts, ever so often
dipping my hand in as though it were a ladle,
sipping your desires as though they yearn
for the seas of my own mind and the silks
of my own skin.

February 8, 2012

Movement

You were
a wrecking ball against my skin, pushing me forcefully
not as a man making love to a woman
or any variation
thereof,
but as a pressure weighing down on
            placing its vast enormity on
a thin cord no longer fit to hold anyone’s weight
but its own.

Sloshing beneath the waves, we moved
silently as two people- I
gasping for oxygen to flood my veins
     and you
breathing with the ins and outs of
     the tides,
our systematic collisions a result
of a body of water rather than our bodies
themselves.

Your skin could not help but prune
in the water,
     mine
with the knowledge of lost time
spent with you-
though we continued to move
     just as waves cannot keep
from their oceanic orbit,
jostling against one another without
eyes or words to recall.

February 1, 2012

ten pm

too early to sleep and too early to sleep
with you,
we lie motionless, one leg each beneath the covers
staring silently at one the other as though we have never studied a single face
in our lives.
your hand grazes my thigh,
moving gently as though studying on its own-
finding its way into territories
marked only for you in a beneath-duvet world;
our eyes stare a moment longer before knowing that lateness tonight
will come sooner than expected.

January 16, 2012 

State

Perhaps this will be the year we do not speak.
I will drive through your borderlines
and lose no key chains and stop for no
one night stays
in dirty motel rooms. 
You were always just a compilation of a million one night stands-
I don’t even know if your bones took
a permanent residence beneath your skin,
or if they were merely
flitty little beings
like your legs always were beneath my covers,
moving in time with mine until suddenly
there would be only the heaving of my own chest
once again. 

January 1, 2012

Winter months

Is there warmth from the heater enough
to maintain my body’s temperature
at this distance from the heat you possess?

If I wrapped myself in a blanket
could I hibernate until the start of spring
and find my way back to you?

Would I need your warmth at all?

January 12, 2012

It is not you

Do not be confused by my disregard
for your time and efforts.
It is not you with which I have troubles,
but rather a profusion of traits belonging to you,
and even a few of which I’m quite sure
I may have assigned to you all on my own. 

December 11, 2011

In my life you were little

In my life you were little,

near to nothing as a translucent cloud

flitting through the polluted sky;

You will be more, perhaps,

in another’s life

elsewhere.

Travelling hands

That my days are lived as an attempt to wind the tiny hands of the clock forward
I cannot be blamed.
If you could see how slowly those dials- as though held back
by some unseen force whenever my eyes desire rest- do travel,
you too, would rise at dawn to pass the hours
and find yourself perpetually incapable of sleep
after nightfall.

November 13, 2011

I never know the course of my emotions
until, in passing
I am able to see my expression reflected
in vacant window panes. 

March 18, 2011