little wing

Even now, in these hours framed by street lamp and starlight, I find my fingers tangled in your hair. Even here, alone in the quiet pallor of electric lights, I find my fingers tracing the creases made by sheet and pillow pressed into your flesh. As if touch alone could call your forth from these moments overgrown with doubt and bitter. As if my hands could summon you, so deft with-in your absence. The eyes decode the symbols as the paper drinks the ink. This message abandoned to the bottle, this letter left hidden in the tide.

It is the taste of my teeth, the weight of my tongue. All pearls unstrung and left scattered in the sand. For a moment there are footprints filling up with water. They pace down the shore, past kelp and driftwood. They wander away from the comfortable spark and cinder of the bonfire. They walk as if they were departing these clumsy bonds of the earth. They wash away, just as you begin watching. They disappear as soon as you begin to think to ask. The flavor of so much wasted speech.

It is the usual morning misstep, writing when there isn't a thing left to say. Dirty thoughts and clean sheets. The scrape and scuff of being wearing out my skin, my head unshaven, my eyes a blur. I smell of sweat, of the lingering season of smoke to come. I smell of bad timing and poor choices, clinging to the dust all around. As I drove home, my hands wandered across the dream of your skin. I drive home, watching the stars over the hills. The strange gatherings of scrub oak clustered against the bleeding neon outposts hidden from sight. Islands of light and commerce trapped behind smudged glass. All of these mysteries, and it is you I can feel. All those oceans and that distance between hardly begun. All this time, and all I keep is distance.