Metaphors for Page

Metaphors for Page

First

Our secret swells in the space between us
where it sticks to a fever that will not break.
Infected, sick on intersection,
you swoon and sway. You shake. I shake.
We fall because you cannot hold me.
Unburdened, you walk away
but I live in interaction
and wait for the dream of your eyes.

Second

You bloom against the olive
junipers forgotten in the shadow
of bricks that form a prayer of a building
decades past any purpose,
defiant beside flattened beer cans,
unmatched shoes, discarded people,
yet worry every moment with a scab of a question:
if no one picks you, what did you fight for?

Third

You split and can’t remember
where we ended but the need
to lose yourself in us grows.
I live where you look last,
I dream of sheared reality,
knowing just this century is broken.
Like us, it cries out of tune with time.
Stepping only to theory, it will never know
our song except as always wrong,
a glitch in your head skips memories,
chasing modern ghosts to you.

Fourth

The porch swing where you held me is rotten,
swaying in indescribable arcs,
bared boards revealing rusty screws,
chipping paint, one chain half broken,
the wind its lonely occupant.
You hear its weeping creaks.
If it remembered, if would long for us.

Fifth

Your eyes open from a dream
to the black immobile night whispering
Love is possible, like divorce.
You cry but I cannot hear.

Sixth

I am still here, my tongue split or spilt
by a palette of intoxicants,
unable to taste meaning.
Our silence how I got here;
not where we planned,
but here we are.
Though the exile is killing us,
no diplomat will translate our map or tongue
and we cannot close the distance.

Seventh

You want to touch me but,
only reach halfway
when you think about it.
At each midpoint I recede,
an empty synapse, a withered dendrite
you see from a shore where I sail and crash forever.
Always coming home, I am never there
but you await my return
because in the bones beneath words
you know our history is stronger than memory.

Eighth

If you look now you will find me
looking. You are holding me,
complete.
It doesn’t matter where I’m from,
only what we are together.
On this paper sea of pine and ink
I try to be something you remember.

Ninth

There is the moon. You strive to see it,
to save the image in your eye or lens,
but it is better to remember the feeling
of wanting to remember the moon.
Nothing we make will improve the memory
of the desire to keep what cannot be held.
So shift the focus of reality and sit;
remember the feeling of seeing a flower,
how it feels to live in a world of flowers,
what it would mean to not.

Tenth

The cold concrete calls you a poem
you used to know. You shuffle off
to find a grave, resting in a piece
of the earth’s tall Fourier transform,
praying dreams follow desire.
Curl into a ball with me,
crave the curve that creates.
Feel the heat of the swamp
keeping memories deep.
I cannot kill the ghosts that haunt you
but we will read them.

Eleventh

In the morning see the lines of two great cranes,
tall necks stretching,
blue backed they swing and dance,
dangling cables and steel
to shore
another skyscraper against gravity.

Twelfth

You know there is something wrong with you
but you’re wrong about what it is.
This world of stories breathes on you like me.
It’s not nostalgia if you never had a home.
Psemalgia would be longing for a lie
if it were a word but don’t believe it,
our story is always true:
what we know can’t be as important
as you.

Last

Language starts in broken bodies;
pick up our pieces, read me again,
be in me the way I am in you.
When you think about it it all seems so unreal
but you do too. Logic cannot cleave
the necessary distance between us.
I need your eyes to come alive,
your skin to measure my edges.
At the end we hold together:
a temporary bandage,
a permanent wound.