There is a warmth clinging to the wind this dusk, a charge in the air hanging even in these empty rooms. The moon making a spectacle of itself, hovering over rooftops, easing through wires and trees. The dark nuzzles the eaves and the rushes, skims the surfaces of water and metal, mingles with the grays of asphalt and the greens of shrubs. I kiss you in this unsettling absence, tongue and teeth forming the ghost of your name, breath fleeing with the breeze. I kiss you in these troubled thoughts, an ache only known by its insistence, a notion to claim or burn.
The world does its work, miracles and curses and all the busy business in between. I sway and falter, find my way down street and aisle. I cough and sputter, mumbling pleasantry and profanity in more or less the appropriate settings. You are the flavor lingering on my lips, the taste that will not fade. You are the motive invisible behind all my petty blessings and unsettling crimes. You are the meaning missed and the reason coveted. My idle hands craft your shape out of the shadows, longing to press and hold.
These hours where the world grows quiet, these moments where I know my own honest heart, where my fingers long to find you and tap at these plastic symbols instead. The devastation of everything's fine, the worry of the insistence of the ordinary, the fearsome grasp of memory bleeding the moment dry. All the idolatry and the idiocy of being owned by a notion that has passed from existence and escaped probability so long ago that time is turned inside out in my mind. Want and loss the only measures of what I gather. Identity proved by these kisses sacrificed to light and vapor, my name evident in the way it is never said.
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