Letting off the Steep Steps (35 and Pedro)

You'll find one in every state:
The gentle rustle as you graze over each one,
Calmly unsettling.
Like the caricature undone
Traced as the lines that run between
Your hand and your family name--
Now both rest in an empty frame.
A bed unmade for interrupted dreams
To stay warm under the sheets
Asking for five more minutes, please...
For the broken waves of stuttered speech...
Three feet in a yard laid between...
Too close to call who won.
Blurred names came clean as I got closer to the screen,
An exhale against the grate as I let go of something great
Evaporated but stuck in the humid air.
So we rode in silence.
And every wasted word was capitalized
As if you'd make a statement,
And maybe I'd find what this state meant for me.

Preamble to the Unable

Orange embers remain,

Present past to this day.

If I could only remember

A single word that you said--

Sunshine.

You were that one time, if I may...

When seas divided by each wave

For a boy more man than I would dare to say

That sparked a flame beneath

The tears and the frays.

Bare truth. Sacred youth.

The static between the fabric

And my calculated game.

While I damned every whispered name,

This cliff was a lip bit that

Teased the hair with which you played.

And I wondered...

If you would draw blood

Or draw close for a kiss,

If you were the green that faded to mist,

Or the salt that my oceans most certainly missed.

And in the absence of everything

Except all that is free,

You were an end I could meet

You were the friend I would need.

The Feeling of Being Saved

Red wine stained your teeth
So often never seen at this time of night,
As every thought rested atop your heard
And buried into your chest.
Cold rain pressed against the window pane
And slid down tired to meet the teary earth
That you fixed your gaze upon.
Mallets were heartbeats that tapped
Shy chords in your shackled throat,
Never a word so softly spoken
Never a home so slowly broken.
And when it pressed on, she took off
Showing a world left in between us
And each other's lives to pull apart.

Snowblind

You were a wish fulfilled that I still tried to redeem.
My heart was pressed against the glass,
Arrested by flashing lights and frozen ground
As you laid your landscape atop feathered ice
And I mapped our stories on a childish gamble.
Piercing eyes made muscles relax around what had been grasped,
And how I spoke too softly when I should have left quietly
To let sunlight scatter across inviting desert oceans.
Verbal contact became the underlining of gentle rays
That made sullen snowflakes jewel beneath a dying sun.
But amongst your fervent colors adorned in modesty
It melted all too quickly into studies of case,
Into uncapturable beauty and effervescent grace,
How sweet the sound,
How sweet the sound.

Letting Go A Bird In Hand

It took 6,000 lies for a tinny truth,
Then covered in silk and understood.
And my lips bent a crease in those words you wrote
That similar sleep in the sentences you spoke,
Faint reflections on clear waterfalls
Dissolved into crystals buried deep in time
Older than the Holocene,
And every stage that did precede,
Older than the trinity
That put divinity into the oldest waters,
Once murky from untold time;
Its remnants now fermented into blood red wine,
Like the last drop down a red clay ravine
Whose glassy bed had been tested and broken,
Seven years it seems.
In any luck - a silent dream, versed and free.
Endless.
Hidden in eternity,
For every stream gets lost at sea,
Willingly.

What We Were Here For

It takes two to five minutes to make my presence known.
It takes a floor of five cynics to make us all feel old
When a lighted touch illuminated the walkways,
And I was high on your scent drawn so far from home.
A cigarette dragged until the orange embers glowed
Boots pressed against the angels that were left in dirty snow.
We were two birds in the same cage.
I was watered-down whiskey and watered-down wit,
Giving my praises, but not giving a shit.
Because it takes twenty five minutes to make the walk home
But only five minutes to hide what I had shown.
You can halve our final hours and wish you hadn't grown,
Or you can have these final hours, because they are your own.