the cool summer air that sauntered into your room through open window
and rustled honeyed hair, that stuck, sweetly, to us by afternoon,
I wore your sweat like perfume
you wore my skin like wolf wears wool
comfortable, intimate, guileful
You promised to meet me for breakfast
each morning
And each morning, I waited
I am still waiting
I drove back to a hospital filled with more banter than our conversations
As you waited
for me to stop crawling into your bed
Instead, we lay there, knotted and twisted
in more ways than one,
keeping score of chest rising, chest falling
I cried over my mother and you held me because I made you believe she was dying, I wanted you to think she was dying, I thought she was dying
I apologized for kissing you the night I sketched castles into the frost of your car, even though it was you
who kissed me
who pushed into wall without first checking for door,
who felt me shaking but wanted too much, too soon
so I gave and I gave and I started wanting too much, too soon
as well
Even though you never asked me to stay, never needed to ask me to stay,
I never left for the island you had ravaged so many years ago,
because there was nothing left, you had marred both of us,
and we all resented the other for it,
this moment is when mountain turned volcano,
it is time now I tell you that you were never the reason why,
But I needed someone to blame, instead of him, and you needed someone to blame, instead of yourself, and we were convenient,
we were always convenient
You fell in love with her,
She who did not, does not know how you loosen yourself when you are drunk and tell jokes to redden wet cheeks
Which is all the time, all the time you are drunk
Drunk off of her, never me
I understand, though, for I am drunk off her too
You asked me how, this time, you could turn over new leaf
and I spat words at you like the water from your faucet that was always coughing up drink for cat, absolution for sin,
I swore to leave for a city filled with everything and nothing that reminded me of you. Warm and putrid, salty and stale, olive and Zoe
Will I see you again? In the French Quarter where we met for the sixth first time
where you ordered a drink I was allergic to, toasted drinks to drinking, even though I don’t drink,
where the bartender told us, cautioned us, “good luck”
Who knew we would need it
We first met when you had coconuts in hand and horse under tail, and we laughed, not about the prince of denmark entering stage left, or the skull that would soon replace the coconuts,
but how we had passed each other for years
like ships sailing along in the night, without realizing
and upon realization, you knew my cousin but you did not fault me for it, for I was everything and nothing like her
When I told you my secrets, you flitted back to that town, the one place you were sure you would never return to
and you have been dancing over, into, through me since
without ever noticing I cannot dance
or perhaps you did take note and that is precisely why you lead and you follow,
away from me, without offering hand or lesson
You admitted, amongst forgotten pages of poem and prose, that we could never commit to one another
because you were an egg but I was not an egg, or we were both eggs, or that you were scrambled eggs and I was an over-easy egg, or something like that
The storekeeper tried to sell you a sampler but the music had already swelled into cacophony and you had grown deaf like composer, from having to compose yourself around me
Still, your fingers traced edges I hadn’t revealed to anyone
Though I had been revealed too many times before that I never told you of
Still, you knew
and it burned you every time we got close enough to touch
Which is all we did when we were close enough to talk, was not to talk
you drank from the pools in my ribs, in my spine,
smoked from the scorch marks you branded after seething fights
You said I was beautiful, starved,
and perhaps that is why I always devoured you and you always devoured her, in excess, without limit, a pattern you were all too familiar with
I could not stop counting and you had never started; you drank to forget it was me in your bed, listening to your records, melting candles down to wicks, writing notes in the pages of books you swore you read, would read,
never did
I loved you for every part of yourself that you could not
Could she say the same?
Should she want to?
Should we be sorry, that after 10 years, we are strangers? or sorry that we were ever anything more?
