sun-soured days at a
sunflower age, seventeen, sipping simple
sunkist babes like a slip-n-slide
straight into my insides
more dimes than a vending machine
and rhyme and flow to stick a kiss,
summer sucking on bottom lips.
don’t blink, you might miss the
boy wonder speaking swift at
honeys.
you found it awful funny,
“in an alabama summer, only
you could want more love
than the sun”
i lash out to lick your
spirit with burning gravity,
dissipating depravity
“i prefer the moon,” you said
and loved me nonetheless.
i couldn’t be the moon for you
but we were light and lovely when it rained
I WANTED YOU
to be a desperate dust bowl farmer,
arms wide as your smile when
you danced in my raindrops,
rejoiced in my kisses on your windshield,
dream of me in springtime traffic
held me in your hands like prayers
for a world with no hell or heaven;
simply downpours to keep us
cool, composed, and complicit in
your demise:
you drowned in me.
the world grew cold and days
without my sunlight still couldn’t
recreate the nighttime you yearned
to love. still couldn’t
recreate the nighttime i burned to be.
no longer was i burning, still as
silence at the center of the galaxy.
the boy who fucked like a supernova reduced;
a singed rock in space, unhinging slowly
into orbit around the spot where your
lungs overflowed with flames dressed
in the trappings of a rainstorm.
i’d pour in efforts and hopes
your body might be buried in
a lake of your name -
you deserved a goddamn ocean.
i’d drift aimlessly into the
arms of other lovers who chipped away
at a dying star until i was merely
a cratered pebble piercing the night sky with
love notes, illuminating the darkness from
outside your window.
i remember the prayers you’d keep
between your palms and purpose
and make my own:
that i might reflect patiently
the purity of your spirit
that i might close my eyes in
the presence of dusk and
love like the moon once did.