Plains

Soaring through clouds of fireflies

to old haunts and kids just

barely grown enough to show their ghosts

too. We sit and I feel ashamed

of the weight I’m pushing on you,

the lead barbells I string around your neck

as we delicately not-touch, my eyes

full of the soft pale patterns on black

the detailed castles of my universe, where

I could call out from the balcony of a branch,

my home a chess piece to the queen

at the edge of this lake.

For a long moment I watch steam rise from

my arms held close to my ribs, before

realizing that it’s all crazy shapes and

the tear I saw roll down your cheek existed

nowhere else but inside.

You aren’t my sea captain,

nobody to whom I’d bend a salt-crusted knee.

Spin with the spirits that sink into cracks

in these endless waves, the long-dead

revenants from times where we loved

one another a little more. Times

when I wrote my words in things heavier

than the arrhythmic pulses in night-time

leaves. When I spoke in sharp small

sentences, leaving no detail untold.

Before I could watch children

struggle for their own meaning

fight with the silent figures on their shoulders,

when I was one of them too;

thick solid flesh meant so little

and the door outside is becoming visible again.

---

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