these cold mornings

These cold mornings I awake forgetting that time is fleeting, then I reach for you. This glimmer of distance the dawdling of the clock on the wall, the mumble of gears turning away. The sense of the press of your hips against mine as dark dreams rouse me. The sense of your warm shadow lingering long after your flesh has left. Sleep dashed along with dreams as I am fitted back into my life. The ashes lingering forever in the fire where they formed.

I feel you like the coal so close to my palm, I taste you like the greasy reach of each sacrificial pyre. You oblige my mind like ritual, engage me like the fixed-teeth of the bike it's like riding. All these words wet sweepings of each enduring ache, all my days just the longing to say your name. This chance enchantment the whole wheel of the world, your hushed perfume still clinging to my pillow, your essence forever mingling with my breath. I know you as wish and whim, the wonder of you such an exhalation, a spell made real by speaking. I reach for you through these fiddled drizzles, shapes bent with tongue and shock to nuzzle with your every fervid moment yet to be. Memories made with the tips of tongues and fingers. History told to blood and bone.

It is this restless incandescence you rile from inside my mind that burns through my every night wide awake and so alone. The wander of your eyes from dusk to dreaming, the impact of your smile so like spending breath. I gasp and reach and grasp. My heart goes wild with want and fury. The way you warm and blush beside m touch. The way  you claim my every sense. This distance always set against us. This closeness always calling us home.

resend

The wind is always waking up, the light is always ailing. Letters that I sent myself in need of misspelling. Something about the way the ache unravels the moment, something about how the song leaves your lips insists. I scrape my hand, I scuff the dust. I reach into the dark and the distance, my touch somehow always missing you the most. The magic of this least resistance, the echoes of every familiar phrase glistening on your flesh. The world is always undone by your habit of absence. The stage another open door.

We speak in tropes and rituals, we breathe in oblivions. The moment left and the moment started, the serpent devouring its tail. The fleet words of our assembled demons, the lost spark caught and given skin. We whisper into the stagnant space beyond the sky, worms withering on the pavement trying not to think about the boot. We loose our ghosts upon every flesh not haunted by our flesh, each turn and tumble anon skinned with-in our minds and set into the ether. The words once loose too late.

These are the customary measures and scribbles, the condensations that equivocate our consciousness, the knot of the symbolic binding us to the lurking world. The sunlight casts its shapes and tendrils, the gaze of the ever hungry heart. We wave our whispered oaths before us, seeing our breath as it thickens into gray fog and glistening beads. We witness our thoughts in the mirror, mistaking that reflection for that glimmer of sentience. I drop my feet along the path in the most need of trampling, I dance this fusillade of artful ache. The scratches that scathe the skins of matter with these suggestions of intent. I want you wrapped entirely inside my touch, these spelled wishes and limping incantations. The chill of footprints meeting the will of the rising wind.