Killed softly, and now you’re on to me,
only you keep picking apart
the wrong reasons.
The steep end of this ocean
convenes at the tip of each wrist,
and if I slit it would be like a dancer,
and you wouldn’t even guess the harm
I’d done myself.
The look of our hearts burned into each other,
the color of leaves- late September-
The singe echoing the push of a long canyon walk
we shared,
hunting for made-up holes in the rock,
sun dipping and drawing out ghosts.
We’d been warned
twice,
and the anger stirred in my belly, but my skin
prayed for the absence of spectral fingers
coaxing us over edges in the dusk.
You’re a maddening force we’ve mapped out,
surviving as giants
in the Arctic Circle
looking down on bears drowning, whispering their starvation
for embrace,
a touch that comes without the spotlights.
I stick to you on the threads of time’s warmth,
but frosty suggestions riot malcontent,
dismantling the effigy of you as sorcerer
and calling you out as the street-hood pocketing bucks.
