In Good Company.
Yes. It's True. The space between here and forever could be filled with your words. Ideas tumbling in a tide like water. An ocean of your prose, so thick that it crests in metaphor as it swells. Casting scattered sentences on the shores. The seashells reciting their favorite verses when held to your ear. And the sky, leaking muddled line after muddled line that collects into puddles that make no sense. The first one my foot crashes into, splashing ink through my soul and staining my sock read, "Long Breath. Drive Brother mine."
The second was splashed across the windshield following that very same long breath as I drive. Visible only for a moment before the windshield wiper erased it forever, read,
"Hoping Denver Flowers for a Kiss."
And then the dew on those flowers bloomed and revealed another and the water beading up on the side of my bottle, another. Until finally I realized that, yes. Absolutely. A poem should always be read with your left hand pressed flat to your stomach and your right hand stirring little circles eloquently in the air before you. And some sentences should be ended with a small pause.... and a false start on the other side of the few moments you choose to give the audience back their breath. And that is when I scrawled down this poem for you. That is when I mixed up your words that were left on the bar in front of me. That's when I wrote with my finger in the ring of water left like a crescent moon on oak. I wrote this and left it for a bar rag to eventually claim. Knowing that I did so to try and be poetic. Something about each moment being fleeting. But, had you been there? Had you been there, I would have hoped you'd understood that I was thanking you. Thanking you for your words, and your gift, and your friendship. Thanking you for accepting me and inspiring me and including me in your beautiful life. And I would have hoped that you'd laugh as I climbed upon that bar and yelled,
" I REALLY FUCKING LOVE THAT WOMAN!"
Standing in the pool of light. Moving in small circles. Smiling. Glancing. Talking in brief phrases, punctuated by laughter. And all the while aware that things had shifted. The planes of our potential, meeting, and shifting, and pushing to form a snowy mountain between us. And each wrapped in skins, marching up the face between the tall pines to crest the top, and over if need be. Me, crashing into you, and you into me. In my head the mantra goes on. Verse by verse. Each one with it’s own meaning but not varying a jot. As easily constant as “She loves me. She loves me not.”
Don’t go.
Stay with me.
Don’t go.
Stay with me.
Over and over. Hoping that something in the way the light form the stars, catching my eye, would convey these words, so powerfully to you, that it would stop your steps from moving on. Into the world. Away from me. And gone. And I am left with coyote, to howl at the moon. He and I in harmony, screaming a woeful tune with words paraphrased from the tongues of Gods. Longing for you to come back soon. And each page of each poem shall be drawn upon. Little margin Picasso’s of letters trying desperately to gather in to an order that holds some merit or worth. My pen racing along the line trying to capture the goose bumped skin of your thigh. Trying to find a rhythm of rhyme that beats in time to the quickened pace of my heart, when you kiss me with an unrelenting ferocity that pushes my bleeding lip against my teeth, and settles my mind to a moment of peace but frees my hands to their own devices. The kiss, feeling less like an affection and more like a crisis. And this ink rolls off my pen, like saliva off of my tongue as I race along it’s even numbered lines in an attempt to scribble down something that will make you understand. I’d sacrifice every even numbered breath for the ghost of Byron to lend me a hand. As his sword/pen slashes this through and through until the only letters that remain, when put together, cascade into a new mantra of
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
And once again, I stare at you as the Earth, the moon, the sun, and the ring around the outer edge of my eye move in circles and hope that the way the reflection of that look, that breath, that way that you touch me, is caught in my pupil and you see it. And it stops your breath as well as your step. And you understand, that as desperately as I want to…
I sometimes don’t have the words for you.
¶ 12:26 PM 0 comments
